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

In the third of five sections Richard Price devoted in Part II of his Observations to examining the conduct of the burgeoning conflict between Great Britain and the Thirteen Colonies – with the aim, as aforesaid, of calling said conduct into question – he proceeded to turn his attention to what he described as, “The Policy of the War with America.” His specific aim therein was essentially to establish that the stated objective of the sitting government of Lord North – i.e. to restore the previously existing relationship between Britain and its American dependencies – was exceedingly unlikely to occur in consequence of the tactics being deployed by that selfsame administration.

The analysis Price deployed to this end encompassed an admirably wide scope of contemporary foreign and domestic policy – from trade, to taxation, to banking – though the cogency of his reasoning was not always as consistent as he might have hoped. On the subject of the mercantile intercourse which had previously existed between Great Britain and its American dependencies, for example, the author of Observations keenly and effectively noted that claims made by the North Ministry to want nothing more than the resumption of harmonious trade were almost wholly at odds with the effects of the various measures that same government had endeavored to enact in the 1760s and 1770s. Similarly astute was Price’s observation that, prior to the onset of the Anglo-American crisis, Britain already enjoyed a tremendous degree of influence over almost every aspect of life and government in colonial America, and that subsequent attempts to extend this influence could not but represent a species of uncommon greed on the part of the ministry of Lord North. His accounting of Britain’s precarious monetary position was markedly less shrewd, however. Capable though Price no doubt was of comprehending and articulating the complexities of 18^th century lending practices, interest rates, and currency values, his personal, ideological, and moral disdain for the luxury and corruption he believed was inevitably generated by easy access to large sums of money appeared to weigh to a greater extent upon his conclusions in this matter than did a rigorous accounting of the facts at hand. Bearing this in mind, one is rightly bound to consider to what degree the whole of Price’s defense of the ongoing America resistance to the North Ministry and its policies was spurred by a kind of spontaneous sympathy on his part to the injustices the colonists had been forced to endure, and to what extent the man was already inclined to question the virtue of any authority whose stated aim was something other than wholesale reform of Britain’s public institutions and political culture.

But let us return, for the moment, to the purpose of the North Ministry’s campaign in America. It would seem to warrant examination the degree to which Price first endeavored to make it clear at the outset of Part II, Section III that said government’s stated goal of reestablishing the accustomed supremacy of Great Britain over the colonies was an acceptable rationale only if it could be demonstrated that some form of advantage was to be thereby derived. Specifically, he explained that,

The desire of maintaining authority is warrantable, only so far as it is the means of promoting some end, and doing some good; and that, before we resolve to spread famine and fire through a country in order to make it acknowledge our authority, we ought to be assured that great advantages will arise not only to ourselves but to the country we wish to conquer.

A fairly durable rationale being thus established – that one country could justifiably assert its control over another only if it could be demonstrated that both parties stood to derive an advantage from the resulting connection – it thereby stood to reason that an inability to meet the appropriate criteria would render the relevant association – or actions taken to support it – wholly indefensible. The reason for this, Price explained, once more echoing John Locke, was that any species of authority, in order to be considered legitimate in the eyes of those who experience its power, must serve some kind of purpose outside of its own perpetuation. Governments that accordingly fail to, “Preserve the peace and to secure the safety of the state [,]” can thereby be considered, by their very nature, “Tyrannical, as far as [they constitute] a needless and wanton exercise of power [.]”

Every authority in every nation on earth was bound to measure itself by this basic standard of purpose, Britain no more or no less than any other. That Britain was the particular focus of Price’s concern and suspicion therefore owed itself – alongside that fact that Price was of course a resident of the same and a noted and longstanding critic of its institutions – to certain specific events that had recently occurred within the context of the Anglo-American crisis. First, in light of his stated conviction that, “A love of power for its own sake [is] inherent in human nature [,]” Price questioned the degree to which the British reaction against the resistance offered by the Thirteen Colonies was motivated by a regard for the law and a desire to restore some semblance of peace and security. On the contrary, he offered, “Is it not the opposition they make to our pride and not any injury they have done to us, that is the secret spring of our present animosity against them?” Had not the British people grown accustomed to looking upon the inhabitants of America as a nation, “Whom we have a right to order as we please, who hold their property at our disposal, and who have no other law than our will [?]” Price certainly believed it possible that this was the case, and wondered if certain of his countrymen might not agree if they examined their feelings on the matter more closely. “Perhaps,” he thus entreated,

They would become sensible, that it was a spirit of domination, more than a regard to the true interests of this country, that lately led so many of them, which such savage folly, to address the throne for the slaughter of their brethren in America, if they will not submit to them; and to make offers of their lives and fortunes for that purpose.

While it wouldn’t be fair to say that Price was wrong to thus question the motivations of the ministers and supporters of the government of Lord North, it nonetheless bears consideration the degree to which he could possibly have known for certain whether or not the relevant individuals were indeed acting wholly out of a sense of wounded vanity. 

The statements issued by the Crown – under the auspices of the North Ministry – in the weeks and months following the commencement of hostilities in April, 1775, while not necessarily all that kind to the leaders of the American resistance, could hardly be described as calling “for the slaughter of their brethren in America [.]” The Proclamation of Rebellion, for example, issued principally in response to the British defeat at the Battle of Bunker Hill (June 17^th, 1775), went little further than referring to the instigators of the incipient colonial rebellion as, “Dangerous and ill designing men,” who had forgotten, “The allegiance which they owe to the power that has protected and supported them [.]” They were “traitorous,” to be sure, as were their “conspiracies” and their “correspondence,” and their actions most definitely constituted rebellion. But neither the king nor his government seemed yet intent on condemning anyone to slaughter. The Speech from the Throne offered in October of that same year was similarly restrained in its use of invective. The instigators of the relevant disturbance in the colonies were guilty of, “Gross misrepresentations,” it affirmed, had deployed a, “Torrent of violence” to ensure the cooperation of their fellow subjects in America, and were now engaged in a, “rebellious war […] manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire.” Doubtless the body of delegates then seated in the Continental Congress would have loudly and explicitly asserted that these were all of them false claims, and that describing the actions being undertaken in defense of American liberties as, “Revolt, hostility and rebellion [,]” represented nothing short of slander. But promises of a massacre, they most certainly were not.

By couching their official reaction in the language of contemporary diplomacy, law, and war, George III and his ministers had thus effectively made it that much harder to determine whether they were acting out of a sense of duty or betrayal, pragmatism or pride. To his credit – and in spite of his evident affirmation to the contrary – Price seemed to be aware of this fact, and endeavored to approach his examination of Britain’s conduct vis-à-vis the American colonies with an appropriate focus on action as well as motivation. If the policies advanced by the North Ministry – or by its recent predecessors – indeed appeared conducive to the salvation and strengthening of the Anglo-American relationship, then there would accordingly seem to be no reason at all to call the intentions of the relevant government into question. Having attempted in good faith to mend an increasingly frayed connection, whatever errors they had committed as a result could consequently have been excused and forgiven as the honest mistakes of an ultimately well-meaning administration. If, however, it might plainly be demonstrated that the actions variously pursued by successive British governments could never have resulted in the restoration and/or reinforcement of the Anglo-American relationship – or even seemed destined to do injury to the best interests of the parties involved – it would appear far from unreasonable to conclude that the purpose of said governments were something less than virtuous and pure. Having determined to wound America at the cost of wounding themselves in turn, the authorities responsible could not but be characterized as having adopted a vicious and contradictory response to having doubt cast upon the extent of their power.

Proceeding to apply this investigative framework to specific aspects of the North Ministry’s administration in America, Price first hit upon the ostensibly reckless manner in which said government had endeavored to pursue certain policies wholly and demonstrably inimical to the preservation of the already much-strained relationship between Great Britain and its American dependencies. To that end, he first set himself to enumerating the many and various pieces of legislation that had been laid by successive British governments upon either the trade of the American colonies or the revenues thereof. The Molasses Act (1733), he affirmed, was the first of these, passed in the sixth year of the reign of George II (1683-1760) with the intention – by taxing competing products – of increasing the sale in America of sugar, molasses, and the spirits derived from either that had been produced in the British West Indies. “As the act had the appearance of being only a regulation of trade,” Price was keen to note, “The colonies submitted to it [.]” Likewise did they submit to an amended version of the same legislation in 1765 – the so-called Sugar Act – though it was pursued with the express intention of, “Raising a revenue in America.” This fact, Price avowed, was cause for some alarm, “And produced discontents and remonstrances, which might have convinced our rulers that this was tender ground, on which it became them to tread very gently.” Nothing like a sustained uproar was then observed, however, for it seemed that the inhabitants of British America thought it yet still permissible for Parliament to claim the right to tax them externally. Peace was thus preserved, for the time being, though the limits of American indulgence had been nearly approached.

These limits were subsequently breached with the passage of the Stamp Act (1765). “This being,” Price affirmed,

An attempt to tax [the colonists] INTERNALLY; and a direct attack on their property, by a power which would not suffer itself to be questioned; which eased itself by loading them and to which it as impossible to fix any bounds; they were thrown at once, from one end of the continent to the other, into resistance and rage.

Vehement though the resulting public reaction most certainly was, however – ranging from hostile newspaper editorials, public demonstrations, and organized boycotts to riots that resulted in the harassment of tax officials and the destruction of public and private property – even these fervent expressions of popular discontent represented only a temporary breach of the colonists seemingly concerted intention to exercise the greatest degree possible of moderation and forbearance. Once the government of the Marquess of Rockingham (1730-1782) secured the repeal of the Stamp Act in March, 1766, the colonists showed themselves perfectly willing to ignore the implications of the accompanying Declaratory Act – the text of which stated that Parliament would continue to possess, “Full power and authority to make laws and statutes […] to bind the colonies and people of America [...] in all cases whatsoever” – and return to a state of peaceful intercourse with their fellow subjects in Britain. The colonists were perhaps not particularly encouraged by this parting shot on the part of Rockingham – this stubborn claim to hold a power which the inhabitants of British America had never consented to bestow – but as Price asserted, “They would undoubtedly have suffered us (as the people of Ireland have done) to enjoy our declaratory law.” Thus, yet again, peace was preserved.

            This was not to be the case indefinitely, of course. For whatever reason, in accordance with whatever impulse, successive British governments in the 1760s and 1770s evidently made it a common objective to continually test the limits of the Anglo-American relationship. Case in point, Price explained, “Little more than a year after the repeal of the Stamp-Act, when all was peace, a third act was passed, imposing duties payable in America on tea, paper, glass, painters colours, &c.” As one might well have expected, the result of this attempt to once more tax the colonies for the purpose of generating revenue – in the form of the so-called Townshend Duties (passed between June, 1767 and July, 1768) – was the resumption of civil demonstrations, editorial condemnation, and organized boycotts. Customs officials were once more harassed, an ultimately failed attempt was made by Massachusetts Governor Francis Bernard (1712-1779) to have certain of the instigators sent to Britain to stand trial for treason, and four British regiments were dispatched to Boston in order aid in reasserting the authority of the Crown’s various agents. Once more made conscious of the fact that efforts to tax the colonies would never be wholly frictionless, the British government – now led by the aforementioned Lord North – engineered the repeal of all but one of the odious duties, the exception being that placed on tea. While this last measure was retained, Price avowed, “In order to maintain a shew of dignity” – hardly a cause to which the beleaguered colonies would have been likely to lend their assistance – the effort nonetheless, “Answered its intended purposes.” The colonists were forced only to avoid purchasing one imported commodity instead of several, Anglo-American trade was permitted once more to recover, and customs agents were no longer to fear being chased out of their homes in the middle of the night by torch-bearing mobs. Price affirmed that this state of affairs would have remained undisturbed, “And even tea would perhaps in time have been gradually admitted, had not the evil genius of Britain stepped forth once more to embroil the Empire.”

            Granting that Price’s choice of words – i.e. “evil genius” – represented something of an overstatement, he was not necessarily wrong to suggest that the North Ministry’s actions following the repeal of the Townshend Duties were difficult to fathom if they could not be attributed to malicious intent. The desire of that government to prop up the flagging fortunes of the East India Company was understandable enough, at least. Having suffered for the loss of the American market for its tea, it was determined that the best method for encouraging a reversal of this state of affairs was for Company product to be sold in the colonies free of all taxes save for a pittance of three pence on every pound purchased. Being thus presented with the choice of going without tea altogether, purchasing illegally smuggled tea – the transportation and sale of which was the subject of continued condemnation and punishment – or purchasing the now cheap and plentiful Company tea, it was hoped that the colonists would take what was obviously the simplest path forward and begin buying what was on offer. In so doing, it was hoped that the withering fortunes of an essential institution of the British Empire might be bolstered at the same time that the inhabitants of America could be made to break their self-imposed boycott and tacitly acknowledge the right of Parliament to lay taxes on their internal commerce. While Price affirmed that this, “Snare was too gross to escape the notice of the Colonies [,]” the residents thereof nevertheless went little farther than refusing to unload the product in their ports. The exception to this otherwise peaceful refusal to cooperate in a scheme intended to trick them into surrendering an essential liberty occurred in Boston, Price allowed, wherein, “Some persons in disguise buried [the offending goods] in the sea.” And though he offered no judgment in the text of his Observations as to the righteousness or folly of this action – that being the much-mythologized Boston Tea Party of December 16^th, 1773 – he did allow that the people of Massachusetts, in his opinion, would likely have been willing to make adequate compensation for the British property thereby destroyed provided that such compensation represented the whole of the punishment they were required to suffer.

            That this was not to be the case should very likely go without saying. For, in addition to the Boston Port Act – to which, Price once more asserted, “The province might possibly have submitted, and a sufficient saving would have been gained for the honor of the nation” – the North Ministry secured the passage of the aforementioned Massachusetts Government Act, the Administration of Justice Act, and the Quebec Act, all by the end of June, 1774. Combined with the four British regiments stationed in Boston following the tumults occasioned by the Townshend Duties, the people of Massachusetts were effectively left under military occupation, with no government other than that which Parliament granted them, devoid of trade with the outside world, incapable of trying certain offenders in their own courts of law, and robbed of the ability to migrate westward as their needs and their desires inclined them. All else that had been laid upon the colonies – as early as 1733 and as late as 1773 – while perhaps not likely to have enamored the inhabitants thereof to the British governments responsible, had not proven themselves beyond the ability of the American temper to endure. They had accepted the taxation of their external trade as being for the benefit of the empire at large. They had consented to a Parliamentary claim of an absolute right to tax their internal commerce so long as it was not unduly exercised. They had even managed to make their peace with the existence of a standing army in their midst over whom they could exercise not the slightest control. Now and then, in response to a policy they felt was unjust, they had certainly been willing to make their displeasure known, sometimes to the point of physical violence. But always, once the policy in question had been rescinded, they returned to their accustomed state of peaceful forbearance. Clearly, in spite of everything they had been made to suffer, these were a people willing to go to significant lengths to preserve the status quo.

                            

            Such a saintly expression of patience was not without its limits, however. Tolerant though the colonists plainly were, they had at every occasion maintained that they were under no circumstances willing to surrender the liberties to which they felt they were entitled by birth. They might have suffered to see them bent to some degree, in the name of preserving harmonious relations between themselves and their fellow subjects in Britain. But such gestures of accommodation were under no circumstances meant to give permission for further encroachments upon their basic civil rights. The popular clamor aroused by the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the Townshend Duties in 1767-68 should have served as ample evidence of this essential truth. The inhabitants of British American were willing to suffer the taxation of their external trade, limited taxation of their internal trade – so long as it was relatively easy to avoid making payment – and even the deployment of armed soldiers to their streets. But they never bore any of it quietly, and, in such instances as came particularly close to forcing them to acknowledge their supposed subservience to the British government, made the nature and intensity of their discontent impossible to ignore. Such was Price’s analysis, at least. Looking back upon the aforementioned mixture of patience and conviction with which the colonists comported themselves during the 1760s and 1770s, and in light of the events of the Boston Tea Party, he affirmed in text of his Observations that,

All who knew any thing of the temper of the Colonies saw that the effect of all sudden accumulation of vengeance, would probably be not intimidating but exasperating them, and driving them into a general revolt.

The North Ministry, unfortunately, appeared truly not to know anything of the temper of the colonies. All evidence to the contrary, “They believed that the malcontents in the Colony of Massachusetts were a small party, headed by a few fractious men […] and that, the issue would prove, in a few months, order, tranquility, and submission.” Events would very quickly show otherwise.

            At this stage in his retelling of the events of 1765-1775, Price once again saw fit to call explicitly into question the sincerity of the government of Lord North in its dealings with the Thirteen Colonies. The members and supporters of that government, he affirmed, did not believe that opposition to its policies was a conviction widely held in America, or that the colonies otherwise unaffected by the events transpiring in Massachusetts would seek to make common cause with the same. Difficult as it might have been to credit an otherwise talented group of statesmen with being so exceedingly shortsighted, the fact of it was at the very least possible. That being said, once the colonies had offered their collective reaction to the passage of the aforementioned punitive acts – in the form of the Continental Congress and its America-wide non-importation agreement – these same ministers would have had no reason to any longer doubt the conviction of the offended colonists or the degree to which they were willing to actively affirm their rights. But while an honest desire to reassert the customary relationship between the colonies and the British government would seem to have required at this stage a basic reassessment of certain policies and a rededication to finding some form of accommodation, the North Ministry instead plunged stubbornly ahead.

             Having been surprised and even frightened, as Price described it, by the vehemence of the colonial reaction to the passage of the aforementioned punitive legislation, Lord North and his cabinet nevertheless refused to abandon their goal of securing the submission of British America to the absolute authority of Parliament. To that end, he affirmed,

A proposal was sent to the Colonies, called Conciliatory; and the substance of which was, that if any of them would raise such sums as should be demanded of them by taxing themselves, the Parliament would forbear to tax them.

Conciliatory though this offer was evidently intended to be, even a moment’s reflection reveals it to be anything but. The substance of it, Price declared, was something to the effect of, “If you will tax yourselves BY OUR ORDER, we will save ourselves the trouble of taxing you.” The best that such a scheme could possibly have done is save face on the part of the affected colonies by giving to them some degree of discretion as to how and from where the relevant revenue was raised. It would not have addressed the question of whether Parliament was legally entitled to make such a demand of the colonial legislatures – answered, by the colonies, emphatically in the negative – and thus could never have served to settle the disagreement at hand. The colonies, now collectively represented in the Continental Congress, accordingly rejected the proposal, and set themselves to the task of establishing the aforementioned boycott on British goods and fortifying their respective defenses in the event that armed resistance became necessary.

            Though it may seem scarcely possible to believe, Price asserted that at this point in the evolution of the Anglo-American crisis the government of Lord North made what would appear to be yet another very serious mistake. In spite of their numbers, the resources at their disposal, and their clear and demonstrated ability to engage in highly successful efforts of collective organization, the members of the North Ministry continued at this crucial moment to think of the people of Massachusetts,

As nothing but a mob, who would be soon routed and forced into obedience. It was even believed, that a few thousands of our army might march through all America, and make all quiet wherever they went. Under this conviction our ministers did not dread urging the Province of Massachusetts-Bay into rebellion, by ordering their army to seize their stores, and to take up some of their leading men.

As with every other measure that had been taken by successive British governments since 1765, aimed at securing the complete submission of the American colonies to the authority of Parliament, this attempt also resulted in failure. The people, Price avowed, took up the arms which long practice and recent preparation had readied them to use, British attempts to seize American munitions were repelled, and a British attack on a colonial position outside occupied Boston, while successful, was accomplished at an alarming cost of blood and talent. “Some of our best Generals,” Price accordingly lamented, “And the bravest of our troops, are now disgracefully and miserably imprisoned in Boston.—A horrid civil war is commenced:—And the empire is distracted and convulsed.” There would seem to have been, by Price’s reckoning, only one explanation as to how this turn of events could possibly have come to pass.

It could not have been commerce, for the colonies had long-since shown themselves perfectly willing to render up any number of commercial advantages upon request by Parliament and the Crown. “They gave up the power of making sumptuary laws,” Price thus affirmed, “And exposed themselves to all the evils of an increasing and wasteful luxury, because we were benefited by vending among them the materials of it.” In light of the degree to which the original Puritan founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Plymouth Colony strove to create societies purged of sin by enacting legal restrictions upon what a person could wear, what kinds of games they could play, and whether they could smoke tobacco or drink alcohol, this would indeed seem to represent a significance concession on their part to the mercantile interests of Great Britain and its traders. Just so, Price continued, “The iron with which providence had blessed their country, they were required by laws, in which they acquiesced, to transport hither, that our people might be maintained by working it for them into nails, ploughs, axes, &c.” As it happened, the terms of the Iron Act (1750) had indeed placed fairly unequivocal restrictions on the ability of interested colonial entrepreneurs to erect any more iron works than already existed, thus conveying a definite advantage upon such British manufacturers as were now able to purchase duty-free pig-iron from the colonies, use the resulting savings to expand their operations, and flood the America market with cheap wrought iron and refined steel.

            Granted, there was more to both of these scenarios that Price seemed willing to admit. While it was certainly to the benefit of British industry – particularly in the realms of luxury textiles, distilling, and artisan metalwork – for the New England Puritan to abandon their various socio-legal prohibitions against personal indulgence, the relevant movement away from strict sumptuary proscriptions did not come solely at the behest of contemporary British governments. Eager though British merchants most definitely were to obtain greater access to American consumers, and strict though the Puritan-dominated governments in New England generally remained in their respective interpretations of what was permissible and what was forbidden, the truth of the matter is that within a few decades of the start of the colonial project, enough residents of the relevant colonies had taken to defying the sumptuary laws that they ceased to be actively enforced. It may be said, therefore, that while British traders naturally wasted no time in seizing upon the opportunity to sell their wares in this previously much-restricted market – thus accomplishing the further integration of New England into the larger imperial economy – neither they nor their sponsors in government created the opportunity itself. By the same token, while the Iron Act did seek to create a set of circumstances by which it was almost certainly cheaper to purchase finished iron and steel products from British manufacturers than from the few American refineries that were permitted to exist, the fact of the legislation itself tells only half the tale. As with the earlier Molasses Act (1733) and the subsequent duties upon tea, colonial Americans were perfectly willing and able to accept the passage of a restrictive commercial law like the Iron Act in public while taking such measures as were necessary to evade its terms in private. As Parliament yet still lacked sufficient means to police the enforcement of most any of its colonial policies, iron refineries and forges remained quite common in contemporary British America, particularly in such cases as their owners and operators were members of the socio-political elite in colonies like Maryland and Virginia.

            Despite his somewhat one-sided representation of the character of the Anglo-American relationship – i.e. the colonies bending over backwards to be accommodating to the vast majority of Britain’s desires and priorities – Price was nevertheless correct to assert that, prior to the middle 1760s, the American colonies had shown themselves quite willing to accept their place as an appendage of the larger British Empire. Privately, certain residents thereof might have questioned the wisdom or the necessity of certain policies or statutes, even to the point of taking steps to actively evade them. But they evidently did not feel inclined to call into question the legality of such measures as the Molasses Act or the Iron Act. Parliament, they evidently concluded, was within its rights to attempt to regulate the economy of the British Empire as a whole, and to take such action to that end, vis-à-vis the American colonies, as appeared to be necessary. That the colonists themselves freely purchased British products – from the metalwork prejudiced by the terms of the Iron Act to the luxury goods at one time prohibited by law in the Puritan jurisdictions of Massachusetts and Plymouth – arguably served to ratify their acceptance of this basic arrangement. Indeed, Price affirmed,

By purchasing our goods they paid our taxes; and, by allowing us to regulate their trade in any manner we thought most for our advantage, they enriched our merchants, and helped up to bear our growing burdens. They fought our battles with us. They gloried in their relation to us. All their gains centered among us; and they always spoke of this country and looked to it as their home. 

                       

Though, again, the author of Observations seemed inclined to portray the inhabitants of British America as inherently – some might say excessively – inclined to embrace their status as the distant province of a large and magnificent empire, his core observation remained a valid one.

The colonists had rarely question Britain’s authority, and never effectively threatened it. The British economy, in consequence, had reaped tremendous advantages by its connection with America, and successive governments had been able to oversee periods of growth, prosperity, and even military success as a result. The North Ministry’s campaign, between 1765 and 1775, to further bind the various colonial governments to the will and authority of Parliament could not, therefore, had had anything to do with an unwillingness on the part of the colonists to continue playing their accustomed role as loyal and active subjects of the British Crown. Rather, Price affirmed, it could only have been the result of a senseless, needless, and ultimately destructive need for a greater and greater degree of control. Thus did he write that the British government and people,

Not contended with a degree of power, sufficient to satisfy any reasonable ambition […] have attempted to extend it.—Not contended with drawing from [the colonies] a large revenue indirectly, we have endeavoured to procure one directly by an authoritative seizure; and, in order to gain a pepper-corn in this way, have chosen to hazard millions, acquired by the peaceable intercourse of trade.

The result of such a “Vile policy [,]” Price vehemently asserted, could not be anything but disastrous.

Having come to depend, increasingly, upon the produce and purchasing power of the American colonies, the North Ministry had nevertheless taken such actions as effectively placed precisely these resources beyond the reach of the British state. If the cabal in question had only been contended – had they recognized that what they stood to gain by attempting to bind the colonial governments more closely to the will of Parliament was by no means worth the acrimony that was bound to result – this might not have been the case. They were not contended, of course, and the result was the effective destruction of the goodwill and amity that had substantially persisted between the people and government of Great Britain and their respective counterparts in British America. Indeed, as Price took to characterizing the matter, “Their love is turned into hatred; and their respect for our government into resentment and abhorrence.” And yet, while it would seem exceedingly difficult to somehow reverse this turn of events, it might not have been impossible to do so. Driven by greed and arrogance though the North Ministry arguably had been in its pursuit of greater and greater control over the economies and governments of the various American colonies, it would not have been impossible for them to cease their ill-conceived campaign of domination in the name of restoring that which they had previously endeavored to destroy. All that would have been necessary – injurious to the pride of Lord North and his cabinet though it may well have been – was for the sitting government to request a halt to armed hostilities, petition the Continental Congress for a formal redress of grievances, and approach the resulting negotiations in the spirit of reason, liberality, and good faith. Only then might the actions of the British government have finally matched its rhetoric.

Price was not so naïve as to imagine that this was a particularly likely outcome, of course. If the North Ministry really did desire nothing more than to pursue a program of reform to the Anglo-American relationship without necessarily threatening its integrity – or even if its members had originally sought something more than that but were willing to admit that they had been mistaken – Lord North himself could have (and perhaps should have) called for a ceasefire at any number of opportunities. When news of the first shots having been fired in anger at the Battles of Lexington and Concord arrived in London, for example, he would doubtless have been forgiven by many of his supporters for deciding that it represented the better part of prudence to pull back from the brink. The costly Battle of Bunker Hill would seem to have represented much the same kind of occasion, or the beginning of the Siege of Boston, or the American invasion of British Quebec. That the North Ministry chose not to avail itself of these chances, however, and that it instead determined with even greater vehemence to achieve the armed pacification of America, seemed to affirm Price’s steadfast belief that it was a lust for power rather than any need for closer commercial ties that had motivated and continued to motivate the sitting government of Great Britain.

Far from emerging from their defeat at the hands of British arms wielded by British hands eager and able to offer the victorious government even greater access to their resources and markets, Price in fact asserted that,

The provinces of America, when desolated, will afford no revenue; or if it should, the expence of subduing them and keeping them in subjection will much exceed that revenue.—Not any of the advantages of trade: For it is folly, next to insanity, to think trade can be promoted by impoverishing our customers, and fixing in their minds an everlasting abhorrence of us.

No doubt Price would have said that this was a fairly obvious conclusion to draw. War does not often turn enemies into capable and enthusiastic business partners. That Lord North and his supporters appeared neither to understand this maxim nor heed it thus appeared to demonstrate that the needs of business were not and had never been their concern. Far from seeking, as they claimed, merely to affirm the proper place of the American colonies within the larger context of Britain’s global financial empire, they rather endeavored to gratify their collective ego and sooth their wounded pride by forcing the complete subjugation of that distant population who dared to assert that their liberties were beyond the power of Parliament to affect.

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

            Having explored, at length, the extent to which he believed that the campaign being then perpetrated by the government of Lord North upon the Thirteen Colonies accorded with the ideals of justice advocated by that same administration, Richard Price next turned his attention in the text of his Observations to a brief consideration of whether or not the British war on America could in any way be justified by the principles embedded in the British Constitution. The result, as noted, was comparatively quite concise, occupying no more than four paragraphs across the length of Part II, Section II. Whereas it seemed Price was willing to indulge a number of the arguments that had been offered as to why the recalcitrant colonies should have bowed to the wisdom and authority of Parliament and the Crown, the subject of the Constitution inspired in him far less patience. Perhaps it was simply that he understood discussions of population, wealth, and property ownership to be within the realm of acceptable discourse. Certainly he disagreed with the various positions he endeavored to highlight, but exploring the nuances thereof – whether wealth should be a source of sovereignty, for example, of whereof the rights of private ownership derived – perchance did not appear to him to threaten the basic principles of Anglo-American society. Calling into question the very meaning of the British Constitution, however, was likely bound to arouse a far less indulgent response, for no reason more significant than that debate over the first principles of a given society potentially threatened to undermine and unravel everything subsequently built upon them.

            The specific principle to which Price sought to address his efforts was that of the freedom promised by the British Constitution to every citizen of the resulting state. This necessarily included not only freedom from injuries like excessive bail, cruel and unusual punishment, and imprisonment without trial – all of which were explicitly protected against by the Bill of Rights (1689) – but also the freedom to exercise a portion of control over the government of the state in which the individual was considered a citizen. The latter, as Price described it – “The right of a people to give and grant their own money” – was of particular significance, being to his thinking, “The fundamental principle of our government [.]” “It is of no consequence, in this case,” he further explained,

Whether we enjoy this right in a proper manner or not. Most certainly we do not. It is, however, the principle on which our government, as a free government, is founded. The spirit of the constitution gives it us; and, however imperfectly enjoyed, we glory in it as our first and greatest blessing.

Of note here are Price’s dueling admissions that he and his countrymen did not necessarily enjoy this principle in its truest sense and that said principle remained true and valid all the same. On one hand, he appeared resigned as to the quality of Britain’s contemporary political establishment – being, to his thinking, corrupt, unrepresentative, obsessed with luxury, and lacking in discipline or virtue. And yet, on the other, his idealism as to the significance of certain basic legal, moral, and philosophical values had not wavered in the slightest. Whatever Britain had become, in his eyes – and however unlikely he believed that change for the better was possible – the principles upon which the contemporary British state had been founded could not be invalidated or altered without entirely transforming the greater whole. 

            What Price seemed to mean by all this, in practice, was that, regardless of how poorly the British government measured up to the basic values at the heart of relevant constitution, those values did not change, and furthermore should have continued to direct its actions in all matters whatsoever. Thus, while he personally believed that Parliament had by the late 18^th century become an unrepresentative institution desperately in need of reform, he also held and expected that, supposing, “The Colonies of France and Spain had, by compacts, enjoyed for near a century and a half, free governments open to all the world, and under which they had grown and flourished [,]” that his government alike with his fellow countrymen would think ill, “Of those kingdoms, were they to attempt to destroy [said] governments [,]” and would further, “Applaud any zeal [said colonists] discovered in repelling such an injury [.]” While it would be difficult to deny – and Price does not himself attempt to do so – that thus supporting a colonial revolt against the interests of one of its principle rivals would have represented sound strategic thinking on the part of the British government, he was also far from wrong to suppose that such tactical support would have been accompanied by much rhetoric – and much genuine popular sentiment – affirming the righteousness of such a revolt against such a species of tyranny and affirming the importance of individual sovereignty. Thus would Price surely have been pleased to note that, while the occasion was not unalloyed by some amount of calculation, the British government and the British people were nonetheless capable of staying consistent to the values to which they ostensibly ascribed the greatest significance.

            The response of the North Ministry to more or less the same scenario playing out in Britain’s own colonial possessions was, of course, anything but consistent. While the various American colonies then in a state of rebellion had indeed, “By compacts, enjoyed for near a century and a half, free governments open to all the world, and under which they had grown and flourished [,]” and were furthermore peopled overwhelmingly by British citizens in good standing, the administration of Lord North appeared in no way inclined to recognize colonial sovereignty, or to even acknowledge that the inhabitants thereof were entitled to the sympathy of the British people. Recalling that the promise of the British Constitution was fundamentally one of free government, and further adding that, “A free government loses its nature from the moment it become liable to be commanded or altered by any superior power [,]” Price accordingly affirmed that, “In the present instance […] we are not maintaining but violating our own constitution in America.” Arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, this was the essence of the North Ministry’s position. Having claimed to uphold a set of principles, the most important of which was the primacy of free, consensual, representative government, Lord North and his supporters were actively working to stamp out exactly that in their war upon the American colonies.

            The North Ministry would not have bowed to this characterization, of course. To the thinking of its members and supporters, nothing in the Bill of Rights – and very little in the Constitution itself – protected the individual British citizen from being acted upon at will by Parliament or its agents. Whatever actions they had taken, therefore, and would yet take in their campaign to restore order to the rebellious colonies, were entirely consistent with the laws, traditions, and norms of the late 18^th century British state. In fairness, this was not a position wholly at odds with reality. The Bill of Rights, ratified by the so-called “Convention Parliament” on December 16^th, 1689, was intended to set strict limits on the prerogatives of the Crown and establish specific, inalienable liberties on the part of the assembled delegates at Westminster. While, to that end, certain individual liberties were necessarily delineated – the right of Protestant citizens to bear arms, for example, or the right of every citizen to petition the Crown for redress – it was not the individual that said document was explicitly intended to protect. Parliament, rather, was the envisioned object of the bulk of the Bill of Rights’ safeguards, and the Crown the object of almost all of its restrictions. Consider: the sitting monarch was forbidden from suspending or annulling a given statute without the consent of Parliament, forbidden from levy taxes without the consent of Parliament, and barred from interfering in the elections of Parliament, the frequency of sessions of Parliament, or the freedom of speech that operated within Parliament. The prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and excessive fines likewise operated against the Crown, the British executive being the ultimate authority in matters of justice in the kingdom.

            Parliament itself, meanwhile, was forbidden by the Bill of Rights from doing very little. The reason for this was simple enough. Parliament was considered by definition to be the representative embodiment of the British people. Every borough and county of England, Wales, and Scotland was therein accounted for, and the interests of every resident thereof (theoretically) embodied. There would accordingly have been no more need to protect the people from Parliament than there would have been to protect the people from themselves. The two, it was held, were one and the same. For Parliament to act against the people would thus have entailed Parliament acting against itself. As this was considered to be essentially impossible, no restrictions upon the relevant authority had ever been put in place. Thus could the assembled delegates at Westminster levy any tax they deemed necessary, approve any law they believed desirable, and establish whatever military force they believed was called for, so long as they abided by the rule of the majority and respected certain ancient rites like habeas corpus and trial by jury. Not only did this grant of authority apply to the whole of Great Britain itself, but by the accepted theory of virtual representation – whereby the various members of Parliament were taken to collectively embody, not only the sum total of their various associated ridings, but the entirety of the Britain’s global empire – it was taken to affect every jurisdiction in which the sovereignty of the Crown was recognized.

            It ought to be taken as a given by now that Price fundamentally disagreed with this description of Parliamentary authority. Being, as aforementioned, highly sensitive to the unrepresentative nature of the contemporary House of Commons, he would surely have been among the first and loudest to affirm that Parliament and the British people were in fact not one and the same. Long-term demographic shifts, alongside the rising influence of banking and mercantile interests, had since the late 17^th century served to separate the interests of the average British citizen from those of the average MP. Safeguards, in consequence, were most certainly necessary – in practice if not necessarily in law – until such reforms could be undertaken as might restore the legitimacy of Parliament’s claim to truly speak for every one of its supposed constituents. On the subject of Parliamentary authority over the various British American colonies, this same conviction was perhaps doubly relevant, owing to the even greater physical and material distances which separated the MPs claiming responsibility for making law and laying taxes in America and the citizens intended to acquiesce to the same. If Parliament, as Price vehemently asserted, could not even reasonably represent the inhabitants of the country in which it was itself located, there was no way it could possibly claim to know or to take account of the needs of a population spread across thirteen jurisdictions several thousand miles away.

            Just so, being a devotee of the Lockean characterization of government – and thus holding that institutions inherently served to aid and protect the people directly affected by their authority – Price also doubtless shuddered at the invocation of such a spurious theory as virtual representation. Whereas, in the sense expounded by Locke, government served the needs of its constituents while always paying heed to and respecting their sovereignty, virtual representation essentially held it as acceptable that a government could act upon certain populations – could indeed claim to be acting with their interests at heart – without in any way permitting them to exercise even the slightest degree of influence. By the terms of such an arrangement, it followed, whether a person’s sovereignty was recognized depended entirely upon where in the physical jurisdiction of the relevant government said person lived. While, as with the notion of Parliament acting against the interests of the people, the text of the contemporary British Constitution had almost nothing to say on the matter, Price – and Locke – rightly affirmed that such a practice was wholly abhorrent to the values upon which said Constitution was based.

This issue – as is so often the case – was essentially one of focus. The North Ministry and its supporters appeared determined to adhere to a strictly textual interpretation of the Constitution. As there existed nothing explicit in any part of said charter restricting the ability of Parliament to levy taxes upon or make laws for people it could only claim to represent – or even from abrogating certain of the liberties of the same – Lord North and his cabinet were prepared to take it as a given that there was almost no policy they could adopt that might formally be considered to be unconstitutional. Price naturally objected to this approach, and in doing so pointed instead to the spirit with which documents like the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta had been drafted and ratified. The various documentary components of the British Constitution had not been enacted for their own sake, after all. Nor were they handed down to the British people from some celestial authority whose knowledge of what was best for humanity did not bear second guessing. On the contrary, the various guarantees, statutes, charters, and rulings which collectively formed the supreme governing charter of the British state represented nothing more or less than the paramount social and political values of the individuals they were intended to affect. To put it another way, documents like the Bill of Rights were as much descriptive as they were proscriptive, in that they reflected the highest principles of a particular community. The restrictions and protections therein were accordingly only a means whereby a desired end might be secured, rather than a desirable end in themselves.

For that matter, said components collectively represented a far from comprehensive mechanism by which justice and liberty could effectively be guaranteed. Without calling into question either the abilities or the intentions of the framers of the Bill of Rights, there was only so much they could have conceivably predicted. Having resolved to address the most pressing issues facing the contemporary British state – i.e. the absolutist tendencies of the monarchs of the House of Stuart – while also endeavoring to put in place such measures as would prevent a resurgence of the same, there was little more they could reasonably accomplish without delving into increasingly abstract conjecture. In consequence, while the resulting Bill of Rights ought fairly to be heralded as a landmark accomplishment in the history of British constitutional law, it must also be distinctly understood as a document necessarily limited by the context of its creation. Consider, to that end, the following. Though the British American colonies upon which the North Ministry effectively declared war in the 1770s were – for the most part – well-established by 1689, the Bill of Rights nevertheless failed to make any explicit mention of Parliament’s authority over the same. Thereby concluding that said document was not constructed with the Anglo-American relationship in mind, it would also seem reasonable to assume that a strict adherence to the Bill of Rights by Parliament could not alone constitute a just course of action vis-à-vis the American colonies.

The events of 1688-89 did not particularly involve the colonies. The events of 1688-89 were about other things. It would therefore have been fundamentally wrongheaded to imagine that the chief constitutional product of 1688-89 should reasonably structure Parliament’s relationship with the same. On the contrary, it was the values upon which the events of 1688-89 pivoted that bore reflecting upon in the context of the Anglo-American crisis. Price seemed to indicate just that conviction, in his characteristically subtle fashion, in the final paragraph of Part II, Section II. “This is a war [,]” he affirmed, “Undertaken not only against the principles of our own constitution; but on purpose to destroy other similar constitutions in America [.]” Noteworthy here was the use of the word “principle” rather than “text.” The author of Observations was not endeavoring to establish that the North Ministry and its supporters were acting in violation of the actual words laid down in the various component documents of the British Constitution. Rather, he was attempting to assert that they had violated the fundamental principles from which those words sprang.

Faced, for example, with the provision of the Bill of Rights stating, “That levying money for or to the use of the Crown by pretence of prerogative, without grant of Parliament, for longer time, or in other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal [,]” the North Ministry should have concluded that the authors of said clause intended taxes to be levied by the consent of the taxed rather than at the behest of some alien and arbitrary authority. Just so, the provision of that same document which mandated, “That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law” should also have indicated to the relevant government that the framers of 1689 believed permanent military forces could only be raised via the acquiescence of the communities whom they were likeliest to affect by their presence. By Price’s thinking, the fact that the text of the Bill of Rights did not make it explicit that these principles were to apply in all situations whatsoever should not have been taken to indicate that they categorically did not apply to all situations not expressly delineated therein. The inarguable reality that Parliament was more representative than the Crown did nothing to weaken this argument, much though the North Ministry would have argued to the contrary. “What difference does it make,” Price thus countered, “That in the time of Charles the First the attempt to take away this right was made by one man; but that, in the case of America, it is made by a body of men?” In point of fact, the assembled Members of Parliament seated in 1776 could no better claim to represent the interests of the inhabitants of British America than could George III (1738-1820) himself. The North Ministry’s campaign against the rebellious inhabitants thereof, while perhaps in keeping with the text of the Constitution, therefore almost wholly flew in the face of the principles embedded in the same. 

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

            Seeking perhaps a more tangible example of the kind of arbitrary power which he feared his government might one day come to embody, Price turned next in the text of his Observations to an event which had only recently transpired in the northern portion of Britain’s American possessions. It being the pinnacle of accepted wisdom, he explained by way of preamble, that, “A government of King, Lords, and Commons […] is the perfection of government [,]” then a government, “By a king only must be the worst [.]” History, again, would seem to have borne this maxim out, at least to the extent that the British people held it to be true. The notion of a singularly powerful and unchallenged monarchy had indeed been rejected by this selfsame population in the 1640s – with the execution of Charles I (1600-1649) – and in the 1680s – with the overthrow of James II (1633-1701) – the results of which were a widespread cultural aversion to and the codified political rejection of any form of government in which the executive power was wholly dominant. In spite of the weight exerted by this basic truth of British political culture, however, the North Ministry had shown itself willing to establish in America a related form of administration which it would have forsworn to exercise in Britain proper. That is to say, by passage of the Quebec Act and the Massachusetts Government Act, the government of Lord North had shown itself perfectly willing to subject certain groups of British citizens to the rule of specific political authorities over which they had – and could never have had – any influence whatsoever. 

            Quebec, it warrants recalling, had only recently come into British possession at the conclusion of the Seven Years War. Accordingly faced with the proposition of administering a vast swath of territory populated overwhelmingly by French-speaking Roman Catholics on the other side of a vast and turbulent ocean, successive British governments between 1764 and 1774 struggled with the notion of which form of government best suited the resulting jurisdiction. Civil administration – in which British common law formed the standard of jurisprudence and renunciations of Catholicism were required of all Canadiens wishing to serve the Crown – prevailed initially, though not without issue. Unwilling to abjure their faith, and generally unfamiliar with the nuances of the British legal system, most of the French-speaking inhabitants of Quebec chose not to involve themselves in colonial affairs, and so became increasingly disconnected from – or even resentful of – their newfound colonial rulers. Aiming to counter this potentially dangerous trend, and in large part responding to the pleas of Quebec’s British governor, one Guy Carleton (1724-1808), the ministry of Lord North succeeded in attaining passage of the aforementioned Quebec Act in June, 1774. Under the terms of this statute, the French language and the Roman Catholic faith received official sanction, French-style civil law was granted equal status to English common law, and a form of government whereby a royally-appointed governor ruled on the advice of a locally-appointed legislative council was put in place.

Noteworthy within this arrangement was the absence of an elected legislative assembly, a feature otherwise common to Britain’s various American dependencies. Granting that the creation of such a body would have represented a significant break with Quebec’s prevailing political traditions – an elected legislature having formed no part of the French administration of that province – the lack thereof nevertheless constituted a significant innovation on the part of the British government that sought to implement it. “Canada,” Price thusly noted, “According to the late extension of its limits, is a country almost as large as half Europe; and it may possibly come in time to be filled with British subjects. The Quebec act makes the king of Great-Britain a despot over all that country.” This was not a power that any British government would have dared to exert in Britain proper, barring some unforeseen alteration in the political convictions of the general population. The rights and liberties possessed by every citizen of the Crown and embedded in the British Constitution were fundamentally incompatible with such an all-encompassing assumption of authority, and it would surely had spelled the doom of any government seeking to introduce such a measure in Parliament. Bearing this essential truth in mind, Price was accordingly given to wonder what it was that gave the North Ministry the idea that this course of action – adverse to the liberties and abhorrent to the sensibilities of the contemporary British citizen – was permissible in Quebec.

Whatever one thought about the Canadiens personally, culturally, or politically, they had been collectively granted British citizenship upon the annexation of their homeland to the British colonial empire. They were, in consequence, entitled to the all of the same legal protections and guarantees to which the average inhabitant of Britain proper might proudly have laid claim. Just so, there was certainly nothing to prevent – and everything to encourage – native-born British citizens migrating into this newly-acquired colonial possession in search of some opportunity or another. Indeed, successive British governments seemed inclined to hope that exactly this trend would take hold and flourish, transforming Quebec from a kind of French-speaking hinterland of the British Empire into a thriving Anglo-American colony comparable in character and economic output to its southern neighbors in New England. In spite of the accordant implications of these basic legal and demographic circumstances, however, the terms of the Quebec Act begged certain troubling questions. Where all of these people, none of whom had committed any crime against the Crown or Parliament, to be denied their right to political representation simply as a result of fate or circumstance? Did simple existence within the boundaries of the province of Quebec serve to nullify their enjoyment of the liberties to which they were inherently entitled? As if Price’s answers to these question were not evident enough from the content of Observations thus far cite, his attempt to connect the implications of the Massachusetts Government Act to those of the Quebec Act made it abundantly clear that his understanding of individual sovereignty fundamentally clashed with that embodied by the policies of the aforesaid North Ministry.

The Province of Massachusetts Bay, governed since 1691 in accordance with the terms of a royal charter granted under the authority of joint monarchs William III (1650-1702) and Mary II (1662-1694), found itself increasingly at the center of the Anglo-American crisis as the 1760s gave way to the 1770s and tensions between the inhabitants of the colony and their nominal British governors became dangerously frayed. These tensions arguably came to a head in 1774 following a demonstration conducted in Boston harbor the previous year during which a substantial amount of British property was destroyed. Parliament, following the lead of the North Ministry, accordingly sought to punish Massachusetts for the intransigence displayed by certain of its citizens via the passage of a series of punitive statutes. Of these, the Massachusetts Government Act was perhaps the most alarming to the inhabitants of that selfsame colony. Under its terms, the colony’s formerly elected legislative council was transformed into a body of advisors appointed by and solely responsible to the royally-commissioned governor, with said office also gaining the rights to nominate, appoint, and remove nearly every other civil office then recognized by the colonial government. The beloved town meeting, by which the various communities whereof Massachusetts was composed were governed, was at the same time prohibited as a form of democratic administration due to its supposed vulnerability to insurgent elements within the general population. In all, the legislative assembly was the only institution over which the newly-empowered governor did not enjoyed near-unlimited authority. Even so, the body’s sitting membership was summarily dismissed at the time of the offending statute’s implementation so that fresh elections could be held.

It should be quite clear, given how much the terms cited above differed from those of the aforementioned colonial charter, that the people of Massachusetts would not have agreed to such a radical reorganization of the only government over which they were capable of exercising even a modicum of control if a proposal to that end had been placed before them for ratification. It was not, of course, placed before then, and for precisely that reason. Having damaged British property, defied the authority of Parliament, and generally made themselves nuisances in the eyes of the Crown, the people of the Province of Massachusetts Bay were to be punished, summarily and without their consent. Doubtless the North Ministry and its supporters believed there was justice in this, though Price maintained that it could not be so in fact. Whatever the people of Massachusetts – or perhaps, more accurately, the people of Boston – had done to injure Parliament, the Crown, or certain British merchants, he affirmed, nothing could justify the punishment they were dealt. Notwithstanding the abrogation of the 1691 charter which the Massachusetts Government Act embodied – an action which in itself Parliament was not legally capable of taking – no government duly formed under the auspices of the British Constitution could justly claim for itself the power to actively take rights away from British citizens in good standing without in any way gaining their permission to do so. The Bill of Rights had not been abolished and the Magna Carta was yet extant; the codified rights to which every British citizen was due were as viable as they had ever been. The majority seated in Parliament as of May 20^th, 1774, led by the government of Lord North, had simply decided that certain of them should no longer apply to the inhabitants of Massachusetts.

Not only did this represent a legal impossibility, but the fact of it – offered without justification or formal limit – seemed to imply that there was yet more that Parliament could have accomplished. Seeking to propel his readers down exactly this avenue of thought, Price accordingly asked them in the penultimate paragraph of Part II, Section I of Observations to consider,

If all this in no more than we have a right to do; may we not go on to abolish the house of representatives, to destroy all trials by juries, and to give up the province absolutely to the will of the king?–May we not even establish popery in the province, as had been lately done in Canada, leaving the support of protestantism to the king’s discretion?

The unspoken conclusion evidently underlying these inquiries, and based on the logic of the North Ministry’s actions, would seem to have been that if the British Constitution could not protect the people of Massachusetts from losing certain of their rights, then it could neither protect them from losing all of them. That he believed his countrymen to be generally unbothered by the notion Price gave evidence throughout the preceding text of Observations. The average Briton, he affirmed, given little cause to consider very deeply the situation of the British Empire’s American provinces, was like to conclude on an almost unconscious level that the colonies – and everything in them – were essentially the property of the British nation, to be disposed of as the government and people thereof deemed fit.

Countering such a powerful expression of self-interest presented a steep prospect indeed, but one which Price attempted all the same. To that end, he asked his readers to effectively imagine themselves in the situation then being endured by their fellow subjects in Massachusetts. “Can there be any Englishman who,” he thus entreated, “Were it his own case, would not sooner lose his heart’s blood than yield to claims so pregnant with evils, and destructive to every thing than can distinguish a Freeman from a Slave.” This should not have been a particularly arduous request, for the same reason that the reaction of the North Ministry to the supposed effrontery of the American colonists made not the slightest bit of sense. The inhabitants of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, alongside those of every other colony then in a state of rebellion, were subjects of the same Crown, protected by the same constitution, and possessed of the same rights as any and every citizen of Great Britain proper. Not only did this entitle them to expect the same treatment before the law as their brethren across the Atlantic, but it served to strongly indicate that their collective reaction to the arbitrary curtailment of their fundamental liberties would have been almost exactly the same as that likely to be manifested by a similarly aggrieved British population. What this meant, in essence – and what Price seemed increasingly keen to communicate – was that contemporary American resistance to the increasingly arbitrary policies of the government of Lord North constituted nothing more or less than what the British people themselves would do if faced with the same basic circumstances. The American people, therefore, far from rejecting the British Constitution and all that it stood for, were instead embracing it to precisely the extent that the values embedded therein required. That the government of Lord North and its domestic supporters appeared not to realize this accordingly indicated that they were exceptionally shortsighted in their decision making, and/or that their affirmations of patriotism and dedication to fundamental principles were almost entirely meaningless.

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

In furtherance of his assertion that the policy of the government of Lord North towards the Thirteen Colonies – then engaged in a course of armed resistance to British authority – was inherently at odds with the basic tenets of the British Constitution, Richard Price next turned his attention in the text of his Observations to both the state of representative government in Britain and the impermanence of any claim to national superiority. Of these approaches, it is perhaps worth noting at the outset that while the former appeared to be of particular significance to Price – being, as he was, an avowed supporter of Parliamentary reform – both ultimately led to the same basic conclusion. Eager though he demonstrably was to promote a more sensible approach to policy on the part of his country’s administrative elite – to save Britain from itself, as it were – the concluding paragraphs of Part II, Section I of Observations begin to reveal a degree of resignation on the part of its author. Through clearly endeavoring to promote a deeper and more sincere appreciation on the part of his countrymen for the sovereign rights and liberties ostensibly guaranteed by the British Constitution, Price nevertheless also appeared to dread that his efforts would ever amount to the outcome he sought. Having argued that the North Ministry and its supporters were being illogical in their conduct towards the American colonies, that they rationale was hollow and baseless, and that time might easily undo many of their claims, he more than once appeared to throw up his hands and lament the evident likelihood that none of these assertions would serve to change British behavior one iota, and that it was perhaps more sensible to celebrate America’s principled resistance to Britain than hope that Britain would ever again be capable of rendering this resistance unnecessary.

Consider, with this sense of resignation in mind, Price’s aforementioned attempt to dispel any claims of America’s necessary submission to Great Britain by way of the contemporary state of parliamentary representation. Seeking to dispel yet another hypothetical argument on behalf of the government of Lord North, the author of Observations accordingly noted that, “The defective state of the representation of this kingdom has been farther pleaded to prove our right to tax America. We submit to a parliament that does not represent us, and therefore they ought.” It was, Price noted, a very strange way of thinking – simultaneously pragmatic and wholly illogical. “It is saying we want liberty [,]” he thus marvelled, “And therefore, they ought to want it.” Not only did such a position appear to suppose that the unrepresentative nature of Britain’s Parliament was essentially immutable, but it demonstrated a degree of pettiness and indifference that did not speak well at all of those who gave voice to it. Indeed, the interpersonal equivalent would seem to be that of an individual in ill-humor endeavoring to make everyone around then equally miserable for no other reason than it appears to them unfair that anyone else should be happy if they cannot feel that way themselves. Truly, it was not a particularly gracious sentiment, and one which Price would doubtless have affirmed was better pitied than made cause for a particular course of public policy. 

            In point of fact, the claim that the inhabitants of late 18^th century Britain labored under a system of government that was almost comically incapable of actually representing their needs and interests was most definitely accurate. As discussed previously in this very series, the constituency boundaries by which Members of Parliament were elected in the 1770s had by and large been established over the course of the medieval era on an ad-hoc basis and in accordance with what were then the major centers of economic activity and population. In consequence, historic ports, markets, and church towns enjoyed preference over most other communities, property qualifications were the norm for access to the franchise, and the specific regulations by which a person was either permitted to vote or disqualified from voting varied extensively from one jurisdiction to another. The flaws inherent in this patchwork system of elections were particularly glaring in regards to the aforementioned pocket boroughs and the mercantile centers that emerged over the course of the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries. The borough of Dunwich, being a prime example of the former, was once the site of a thriving port in Suffolk whose fortunes gradually declined following its recognition in Parliament as the sea steadily swallowed the town itself and reduced its population by the beginning of the 18^th century to something less than five hundred souls. By the beginning of the 19^th century there were only thirty-two recognized electors in Dunwich, fully half of which were assigned on an election-by-election basis by a pair of local landholders. On the other end of the spectrum was the county constituency of Warwickshire, which, in spite of containing the burgeoning industrial city of Birmingham – whose population in the late 1770s exceeded forty thousand – registered only a few thousand electors and continued to be dominated by local landed interests. The significance of these kinds of disparities was that the voters of an underpopulated constituency – like Dunwich – enjoyed far more influence over the disposition of Parliament than did their counterparts in an overpopulated constituency – like Warwickshire. This state of affairs unequivocally represented a manifest injustice, and one whose ill effects were actively magnified as the years wore on.

            Richard Price would surely have been the last person to argue with this kind of assessment. Not only was he fully aware in 1776 of the deplorable state of political representation in his homeland, but he represented one of the few individuals possessed of significant social capital who was at that time yet willing to advocate for an appropriate course of reform. That being said, however, he would also have been one of the last people to agree with the hypothetical assertion that the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies should not expect to have their own woes regarding political representation addressed before those of their British resident counterparts. In this sense Price was perhaps something other than a nationalist, if that term can be said to apply in the context of the late 18^th century. He was not someone who favored solving British problems first and foremost to the exclusion of all others. Nor did he seem to draw the same socio-cultural distinction between residents of Britain proper and the population of the larger empire that so many of his countrymen seemed to by default. Owing perhaps to his vocation as a Non-Conformist preacher, his upbringing on the fringes of mainstream British society, and his evident belief in Lockean ideas of sovereignty and justice, Richard Price instead seemed to tend towards the basic conviction that equality before the law was among the highest values to which any civilization could aspire. In his eyes it accordingly made no difference whether a person was born and raised in Britain or had never – and would never – set foot upon its shores; all were entitled to the same rights, the same liberties, and the same expectation of sensible and trustworthy government.

            Bearing this in mind, it was only natural that he would have recoiled at the notion that some people were entitled to the fulfillment of their rights in advance of others. The people of Britain and the people of America were equally deserving of truly representative government, and likewise equally entitled to pursue that aim by whatever means they had at their disposal. If Britain secured this outcome before their trans-Atlantic brethren, the latter had no call for jealously, bitterness, or resentment. On the contrary, they should be given instead to celebrate the realization of a goal to which they themselves attach a great deal of significance. Just so, if the people of America managed to achieve something like this same outcome for themselves – by, say, collectively extricating themselves from the authority of a government in which they were not represented – their British counterparts should likewise give praise that their shared goal had been in some measure accomplished in some corner of the globe. To do otherwise would be plainly hypocritical. And to blame the inhabitants of colonial America for the iniquities of the contemporary British Parliament would be senseless and cynical. On the contrary, the author of Observations asked of his countrymen, “Ought we not rather to wish earnestly, that there may at least be ONE FREE COUNTRY left upon earth, to which we may fly, when venality, luxury, and vice had completed the ruin of liberty here?” While this passage hardly speaks to any hope on Price’s part that his homeland was capable of being saved, it does powerfully affirm his conviction that liberty was something to which every human being was equally entitled, and that the creation of a system of government reflective of this basic truth should rightfully be encouraged in every quarter rather than understood as an object fit for competition.

            The discussion Price saw fit to devote to the subject of representative government in the text of his Observations, in addition to giving rise to the commentary cited above, also served to introduce an idea which subsequent passages of that selfsame document would shortly explore in greater depth. Specifically, it was the notion that the goal being then pursued by the American insurrectionaries – i.e. a government which respected their basic rights and liberties – represented nothing more or less than the embodiment of the values embedded in the British Constitution. The inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies, the relevant text affirmed, did not want more for themselves than what any British person would have claimed as their birthright, in no small part because both Britain and British America recognized the same socio-cultural touchstones and promoted the same political values. It accordingly represented a shameful pretense to claim that the American attempt to resist efforts intended to bring the colonies to heel constituted anything even remotely close to treason. If the members of the North Ministry and their supporters could not see this, it was perhaps because they had not considered the significance of their various policy initiatives from the perspective of the liberties they themselves would surely have claimed to cherish and uphold.

            Consider, to that end, a scenario Price offered his readers in one of the last paragraphs of Part II, Section I of Observations. “Britain is now,” he allowed – though perhaps, in hindsight, without much conviction – “The seat of Liberty and virtue, and its legislature consists of a body of able and independent men, who govern with wisdom and justice.” Conciliatory though this phrasing might seem to the position being firmly upheld by his nominal opponents, however, it in fact represented only the initial premise of substantially more challenging line of inquiry. “The time may come,” Price thus continued,

When all will be reversed: When its excellent constitution of government will be subverted: When pressed by debts and taxes, it will be greedy to draw to itself an increase in revenue from every distant Province, in order to ease its own burthens: When the influence of the Crown, strengthened by luxury and an universal profligacy of manners, will have tainted every heart, broken down every fence of Liberty, and rendered us a nation of tame and contended vassals: When a general Election will be nothing but a general Auction of Boroughs: And when PARLIAMENT, the Grand Council of the nation, and once the faithful guardian of the state, and a terror to evil ministers, will be degenerated into a body of Sycophants, dependent and venal, always ready to confirm any measures; and little more than a public court for registering royal edicts […] What will, as that period, be the duty of the Colonies?

Bearing in mind the various frustrations expressed by Price that have thus far been cited in this present series, it hardly seems a stretch to infer that the qualifying phrase, “The time may come” was almost certainly intended as a cover for his belief that in fact the time had already come when the disreputable conditions he thereafter named were actively manifest in the politics and policy of the contemporary British state. Britain was heavily indebted following its involvement in the Seven Years War (1754-1763), he explained, and eager to generate revenue from its American dependencies. Its legislature was wildly unrepresentative, and subject to chronic electoral corruption. And its executive government was too easily swayed by moneyed interests, subject to royal favoritism, and groaning under the weight of an over-inflated bureaucracy. Having seen these things for himself, however – and marked them out accordingly – Price was now asking his nominal opponents to consider them in turn.

    More to the point, he was asking them to determine what course of action the American colonies ought to follow should such a scenario come to pass. “Will they still be bound to unconditional submission?” he thus wrote. “Must they always continue to be an appendage to our government [,] and follow it implicitly through every change that can happen to it?” Fanciful though the scenario embedded in these questions might have seemed to many of his readers, Price maintained that the odds were decidedly against Great Britain remaining indefinitely the bastion of liberty so many of its inhabitants believed it to be. A crisis could occur, leading to a sudden – and perhaps entirely necessary – increase in the authority of the cabinet which in time might well become habitual. Jealous of its newfound power and disinclined to relinquish it, said cabinet may well then seek to disarm Parliament, establish a standing army to enforce its rule, and precipitate another civil war. A very similar train of events had occurred in Britain over the course of the 1640s. And while steps had certainly been taken since then meant to ensure that no executive could ever again usurp the power of a duly-constituted parliament, such measures were only effective if recognized and heeded by the major actors involved. Some future ministry might yet choose to disregard them, backed by an army paid and supplied by merchant and banking interests whose leaders believed they stood to gain by the abrogation of certain basic civil liberties. While, again, this might not have seemed the most likely scenario to the average reader of Observations, Price rather astutely pointed out that it didn’t have to be particularly likely to be relevant to the present discussion. “Can you give the Colonies any security that such a period will never come?” he thus demanded. That the supporters of the North Ministry could not offer this guarantee – nor, indeed, could anyone else – very much formed the crux of Price’s aforementioned anxiety.