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.