Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Part IX: Illogical, Unthinking, Hypocritical Britain, contd.

A further reason Richard Price had heard advanced for the rightness of Britain’s dominance vis-à-vis the Thirteen Colonies, he next affirmed, was the apparent, “Superiority of the British State.” In response to such vague rationale, the author of Observations was quite reasonably given to ask, “What gives us our superiority?–Is it our Wealth? […] Is it the number of our people? […] Is it our knowledge and virtue?” To each of these he answered in the negative, thus dismissing “superiority” as a possible criterion for political domination as well as exposing some degree of his own and his countrymen’s cultural and philosophical biases. To the question of wealth, for instance, Price responded that, “This never confers real dignity. On the contrary: Its effect is always to debase, intoxicate, and corrupt.” It would not be difficult to imagine that many of Price’s countrymen indeed thought that wealth was a source of dignity, and that the tremendous wealth collectively possessed by the British people at the end of the 18^th century did rightly entitle them to claim a measure of functional superiority over their American counterparts. Given to exaggeration though the author of Observations might have been – especially when it came to the aspects of contemporary British society he found distasteful – banking, investing, stock-jobbing, and various other “new money” ventures really were in the midst of transforming the British state. As wealth became concentrated in the hands of those who in a previous era would not have possessed much, if any, social capital, values began to shift as money became revered nearly as much as landed title.

As Price noted, however, such vast accumulations of wealth were not solely a source of dignity and respect. Money makes people question their convictions, and in larger sums has an even greater effect. The wealth generated by Britain’s turn towards national banking, mercantilism, and territorial expansion was accordingly bound to have a proportionate effect on the integrity of that nation’s culture and institutions. Positions of power changed hands, favors were trades, bribes made and received. Such things seem to be inevitable in any sufficiently complex socio-political framework, and become more pronounced as more money and more power become available. Individuals have been known to resist, of course, and steps have certainly been taken historically by whole cultures and governments to negate the influence of excess wealth on the direction of public affairs. For this reason Price’s claim that the only effect of wealth “Is always to debase, intoxicate, and corrupt” represents something of an overstatement. That being said, it is very much in keeping with his aforementioned affinity for the reformist ideology of the Country Party and its successors. Having become convinced that any corruption represented an indelible stain on the national soul, and that what corruption Britain had theretofore experienced was the result of the conspiratorial machinations of a moneyed and connected elite, Price would naturally have been among the first to claim that wealth could never entitle a single person – let alone an entire nation – to unquestioned supremacy over their fellow man.

To the question of population, Price again answered in a way that perhaps implies more than it plainly states. “The Colonies,” he declared, “Will soon be equal to us in number.” While in retrospect it may seem a rather silly thing for one nation to claim a right of superiority over another based on a difference in population, the implication is perhaps not so difficult to grasp. One must assume, of course, that Price wasn’t misrepresenting his countrymen in thus describing their rationale. That he appeared not to question the premise of the question would seem to indicate that he was not. Bearing this in mind, it would appear likely that both Price and those of his fellow Britons he had set himself against were given to thinking of the relationship between different communities of people along roughly democratic lines. In Parliament, after all, MPs were elected to serve their constituents by a majority vote, and these representatives in turn approved legislation by the very same logic. While there existed in 1776 no assembly in which the combined representatives of Britain and America sat, it would nevertheless have been far from unnatural for a contemporary British citizen to envision the relationship between their own nation and its American dependencies according to much the same logic. If there were simply more people in Britain than America, why should not the intercourse between them proceed in the same manner as a debate in Parliament? Why shouldn’t Britain, representing the greater share of humanity, see its will triumphant over that of America? It was only logical, after all, whether a vote could actually be taken or not.

In truth, it’s rather curious that Price appeared to grant this premise at all. Sanguine though he appeared to be towards the principle of majority rule – there being no evidence to suggest that he was not – he had also made it fairly clear within the text of his Observations that he believed there was a crucial difference between the logic of relations among communities within a given state and the logic of relations among a group of separate states. The majority of the representatives sitting in a legislature – even if they represented only fifty-one percent of those present – had every right to determine which laws were to be put in place effecting one hundred percent of the population because every member of the society to be effected – in theory, at least – possessed some degree of input into the relevant process. Such a deliberative apparatus conversely did not exist between two sovereign, independent states. Within the context of the Anglo-America relationship, for example, power was the deciding factor in terms of which policies were enacted and which were not. Great Britain – circa 1776 – was militarily and economically more powerful than even a united America, thereby allowing it to effectively dictate what would and would not come to pass between them. That this power had nothing to do – or very little to do – with population should be exceptionally obvious. Certainly there were more people living in Britain at that time than lived in America, but that fact had no effect whatsoever upon how decisions were made. Parliament decided what was to become of America without paying any heed – or being legally obligated to pay any heed – to the stated desires of the inhabitants of British America. A sudden increase in the American population would accordingly have made no difference to this state of affairs. Inclined though certain British people made have been – quite possibly including Price himself – to think about public policy in terms of majority rule, therefore, the concept had no application whatsoever within the context of the Anglo-American relationship.

All the same – and for whatever reason – Price did engage with the idea. And his contention, as cited above, was that, “The Colonies will soon be equal to us in number.” Bearing in mind that the word “soon” can be variously interpreted to mean anything between “any minute now” and “within the next century,” Price might fairly be said to have been right. At the time of its first official census in 1800, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland contained something on the order of fifteen million people. The United States of America, in that same year conducting its second decennial census, was conversely home to slightly less than five and a half million. Twenty-five years, it would seem, was not enough time for Price’s prediction to come true. If one were to press forward, however, though the 1810s, 20s, 30, 40s, and 50s, the corresponding population data for 1860 appears to bear out its validity. At that point the population of the United Kingdom had reached a figure just shy of twenty-nine million. The United States, by comparison, was sitting at a total of thirty-one million. Without going into how this came to be – a discussion having to do mainly with the Industrial Revolution, the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, and the resulting explosion of European migration to America – it will here accordingly suffice to observe that Price was ultimately proven correct within about ninety years of his having made the claim in question.

Whether this fact has very much at all to do with the argument he was attempting to advance within the text of his Observations – i.e. that Britain had no inherent right to declare itself the master of America – is eminently debatable. Again, mere population seemed to have very little connection to the fundamental point he was trying to make. That being said, Price’s claim was rhetorically an effective one. In answer to the hypothetical assertion that Britain deserved to dictate to America because the residents of the latter outnumbered those of the former, Price declared that this would soon no longer be the case. While he was proven right within the span of a century, there was naturally no way for him – or anyone else, for that matter – to confirm this fact. Then again, there was also no way for a prospective opponent to dismiss it. Therein, arguably, lay its genius. By offering an effectively un-confirmable counter to a claim with which he disagreed, Price essentially neutralized it. No one could confirm in 1776 that the American population would one day meet and eclipse that of Britain. Nor could they deny it, however, beyond the shadow of a doubt. That being the case, it would surely have seemed foolish to the supporter of British supremacy to base their claim upon such an uncertain principle. Consider, for example, the likely result of a sudden famine in Britain. Millions might have perished, and as many might have migrated to America. Within ten years, or twenty, or thirty, Britain might accordingly have no longer possessed the larger share of the empire’s population. And what then of British claims of superiority? How then could anyone justify a smaller nation holding authority over a larger one? Population, in short, could not be taken a basis of argument. It could change too suddenly, too quickly. It was not solid. It could not be depended on.

This may well have been exactly the point that Price was trying to make. Again, it’s not clear why he felt the need to engage with the notion of demographic superiority when his fundamental point had been and would be better made by other means. But so long as he did choose to address the argument that Britain somehow deserved to rule over America because there were more British people than there were Americans, the implications of his counterargument were nonetheless highly significant. Numbers, in the context of national sovereignty, made no difference to whether a nation could govern itself or not, or whether it could govern another nation or not. Self-government was not a prize a state only gained only after breaking a given demographic threshold, nor was it something that could be accumulated in excess and exerted by one state upon another. Sovereignty was inherent, fundamental, and immutable, having nothing to do with population, wealth, or power and everything to do with the humanity, liberty, and dignity of the individual. It could be delegated, channelled, and even constrained by mutual consent. But it could not be taken away from one nation because another claimed to have more of something than its counterpart.

Not only would it have been fundamentally inhuman to accordingly treat the right of self-government like some kind of reward, but it would very shortly prove a very foolish basis upon which to justify one’s authority. Because population, just like wealth, military power, and cultural distinction, ebbs and flows according to trends predictable and unpredictable, artificial and naturally occurring. Rooting the authority of one’s nation – particularly in terms of its right to hold sway over other nations – in the possession of an advantage in any of these categories would therefore inevitably open one up to being conquered, subsumed, or overawed whenever fate happened to dictate a sudden change in material circumstances. Not only would this seem to present an intolerable state of affairs – i.e. nations constantly shifting between ruling others and being ruled – but it would once again appear to wholly discount the fundamental value of the human spirit. People, Price had earlier affirmed in the text of his Observations, were not livestock to be manhandled as those who sought to benefit from their existence saw fit. On the contrary, they were thinking, feeling beings to whom a quantity of basic respect was owed and from whose consent all forms of government necessarily derived.

The supposed “knowledge and virtue” of the British people was likewise dismissed by Price as being for the most part illusory. Britain may well have been able to boast of the keen minds and noble hearts among its many millions, but this hardly made it exceptional among nations. Indeed, Price avowed, the inhabitants of America, “Are probably equally knowing, and more virtuous. There are names among them that will not stoop to any names among the philosophers and politicians of this island.” As with the issue of population cited above, a claim such as this could not easily be confirmed. Certainly there were a handful of prominent Americans whose efforts in their chosen fields had indeed made them famous beyond their native environs. There were painters, for example, like John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) and Benjamin West (1738-1820), both of whom migrated to Britain in the latter half of the 18^th century in pursuit of the kind of exposure and patronage the colonies simply could not supply. West in particular met with great success, his work garnering him the sobriquet of “the American Raphael” among the British public. He was later appointed president of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1792. Theologians were also among those Americans whose reputations managed the long Atlantic crossing. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was undoubtedly the most prominent of these, being one of the principal contributors to the trans-Atlantic religious revival that swept across the British Empire in the 1730s, 40s, and 50s – the so-called “First Great Awakening” – an ardent ally of reformist English preachers like George Whitefield (1714-1770), and the author of numerous books, pamphlets, and sermons that are in some cases still read today by British and American Evangelical Christians.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), of course, was without a doubt the most famous American of the pre-Revolutionary era, both among his countrymen in the colonies and the wider British public. A printer, writer, scientist, inventor, philosopher, and satirist, Franklin crossed the Atlantic numerous times over the course of his long life, becoming variously a public intellectual and man of letters in his adopted home city of Philadelphia, a diplomat and statesmen in the Court at Westminster, an early patron and member of the Royal Society of Arts in London, and pioneering natural philosopher with honorary doctorates from St. Andrews and Oxford universities. He was also a friend and contemporary of Price himself, alongside numerous other reformers, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and statesmen then living and working in late 18^th century Britain. In consequence of these many and varied accomplishments and connections, Franklin was for many contemporary British citizens the only American they could easily name. That he was also one of the most prominent public figures of the era – a kind of 18^th century celebrity, if you will – doubtless lends some credence to Price’s aforementioned claim. There may not have been very many Americans in the 1770s whose talents were being celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, but those few who managed to achieve this pinnacle of success certainly spoke well of the abilities of their fellow countrymen. West, Edwards, and Franklin were among some of the most successful and most acclaimed in their respected fields, to the point that their parochial origins ceased to stand in the way of their being embraced by the mainstream of contemporary British society.

Whether this could be said to validate Price’s claim of Americans being “equally knowing” when compared to their British counterparts remains an open question, however. After all, how does one measure the relative possession of knowledge or skill? Great Britain – as mentioned at length above – possessed the larger population circa 1776, therefore almost certainly guaranteeing that the number of particularly intelligent, knowledgeable, or accomplished individuals living therein was bound to be greater than comparatively minuscule America could hope to boast. Did that mean that Britain was the more knowledgeable nation? Or were such things best measured on a per capita basis? That is to say, was it valid to claim – with the aforementioned American luminaries as examples – that the most intelligent Americans were the equals of the most intelligent Britons? There were not – perhaps could never be – easy answers to these questions. All the same, Price was at the very least correct in asserting that Americans, as a people, were not less intellectually capable, artistically inclined, or morally upstanding than their British equivalents.

This once again seemed not to be the point, however. Proud though contemporary Americans had every right to be of the accomplishments of their various prominent countrymen, these accomplishments bore no relationship at all to their possession of certain fundamental liberties. Rather, as Price himself asserted in his Observations, they derived their entitlement to free worship, free movement, free property, and free government simply from their status as members of the human race. Relative wealth did not affect this, any more than did physical power, fame, knowledge, or numbers. People were free, he affirmed, by nature, and when they formed communities, those communities were free. And then those communities sought to administer themselves, the resulting governments were free. All derived from the fundamental autonomy of the individual, and all ceased to function if that autonomy was curtailed. Not only was this fairer than assigning sovereignty only to those whose communities could boast the smartest, strongest, ablest members, but it was infinitely more sensible. Late 18^th century Britain had certainly given rise to more than its share of intellectual and artistic luminaries – to the point that it could fairly be said to dominate the Anglo-American public discourse – but there was simply no way to guarantee that this would always be the case. Consequent to any number of factors, America might suddenly experience a tremendous and unprecedented explosion of talent and expression in the arts, sciences, and humanities, thus drastically shifting the cultural balance in its favor vis-à-vis its nominal colonial master. What then? Should anyone living in the contemporary Anglo-American world thereafter expect Parliament to acquiesce to the dictates of the united colonies? Price’s answer – notwithstanding his evident willingness to engage with the basic premise – would almost certainly have been that such thinking was plainly ridiculous. The British and American peoples were each sovereign in and of themselves, regardless of how wealthy, or numerous, of intelligent they happened to be. This was only proper, only just, only right.