Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Part VI: Illogical, Unthinking, Hypocritical Britain

            Having gone to significant lengths in the text of Part I of his Observations to lay out precisely what it was he understood of liberty in practice – with pervasive reference to the program of the 17^th century Country Party – Richard Price thereafter proceeded to examine the facts of contemporary British government policy in the empire’s restive American dependencies. At the time that he was writing, it would do well to recall, the Thirteen Colonies were effectively in a state of war with their nominal European overlord as though they were a nation unto themselves. The colonies, in addition to maintaining their traditional legislatures and governors, were at least partially under the authority of a series of revolutionary congresses, none of which recognized the authority of the sitting British government. These “provincial congresses,” in turn, sent delegates to a Continental Congress in Philadelphia whose leadership sought alternately to direct an ongoing military conflict with Britain and pursue a peaceful settlement with the same. Battles had been waged – principally in Massachusetts – the British occupation of Boston had largely been stymied, and an American invasion of Quebec had been launched and defeated, all by the end of 1775. It had been, in short, an eventful year.

As the sun rose on 1776, however, the colonies had yet to take the step of declaring their independence from Great Britain. In spite of everything that had occurred thus far – the blood that was shed, the vitriol spewed forth – Congress and the North Ministry were united in their common desire for a settlement of the dispute and a return – more or less – to the status quo. The Thirteen Colonies, it seemed, for all the grievances their citizens nurtured against successive British governments, in large part maintained that continued union with Great Britain was in their collective best interest. Just so, notwithstanding the degree to which certain colonists and their governments had defied the authority of Parliament and the Crown, the government of Lord North (1732-1792) was no less convinced that Britain stood to benefit economically, strategically, and diplomatically from America’s continued inclusion within the larger British Empire. Bearing this shared conviction in mind, however, and exploring all the ways in which the North Ministry and certain of its predecessor sought to pursue it, Price was forced to note a rather curious state of affairs. Long though successive British governments had claimed to value America, it resources, and its people, and adamant though the contemporary administration of Lord North was as to the need to defend the principles of the British Constitution in the face of a sustained and systematic challenge, almost nothing that Britain had done or continued to do in the name of preserving its rule in America seemed at all capable of producing that result. On the contrary, Price asserted, it looked as though, beginning in the 1760s, one ministry after another had done everything in its power to alienate people of America, drive the colonists away from any further connection with the British Empire, and violate nearly every constitutional principle that Parliament traditionally claimed to uphold. Whether the result of misapprehension, thoughtlessness, or insincerity, these errors were the reason Price believed the Anglo-American relationship could never be repaired, and also why he seemed increasingly convinced that it was likely preferable this should be the case.

In seeking to advance this argument, Price first set about establishing a few more basic principles on the order of liberty in theory and practice. Namely, he set out to explore – in Part I, Section III of Observations – a subject of particular significance within the context of the Anglo-American relationship, being the validity of one country claiming authority over another. Having already discussed the degree to which he believed liberty was contingent of the possibility for independent action, it very much stood to reason that Price would apply the same logic to the relationship between master and subordinate nations and arrive at the same conclusion. Just as there was – to his thinking – no way to deny a people the ability to reasonably act out their desires without in some way infringing on their liberty, he affirmed that,

It is an immediate and necessary inference that no one community can have any power over the property or legislation of another community, that is not incorporated with it by a just and adequate representation.– Then only, it has been shewn, is a State free, when it is governed by its own will. A country that is subject to the legislature of another country, in which it has no voice, and over which it has no countroul, cannot be said to be governed by its own will. Such a country therefore, is in a state of slavery.

Declining at this stage to name any specific countries, Price’s intention would nonetheless have been hard to mistake. Though they were colonies in point of law, the various governments that then existed in British America were by and large the functional equivalent of independent states. Granting that their various chief executives were most often appointed by the Crown on the advice of the Privy Council, each possessed a legislature and a judiciary that were functionally independent of either Parliament or the various British courts. That these selfsame colonial assemblies undertook to levy taxes upon the communities that elected their members was thus entirely in keeping with the basic principles of the British Constitution and represented precisely the kind of functional autonomy that Price had earlier associated with liberty.

            In the event, however, that Parliament attempted to levy taxes upon these American communities – as they did in 1764, 1765, 1766, and 1773 – the continued existence of liberty became at once doubtful. America did not elect members to sit in the Parliament of Great Britain – i.e. America was not, “Incorporated with [Britain] by a just and adequate representation.” The taxes allocated by that body thus represented something other than the will of the citizens to which they were meant to be applied. By Price’s definition, the various colonies could thus be fairly characterized as countries, “Subject to the legislature of another country, in which [they have] no voice, and over which [they have] no countroul [.]” It followed that America thus “governed” by Britain, “Cannot be said to be governed by its own will [,]” and was in effect existing in a state of slavery. Bearing in mind that slavery was yet still legal in the British Empire, Price’s invocation of the practice was most definitely intended as a critique upon the British Parliament’s treatment of its nominal American constituents. However Price may have felt personally about the practice – and there would seem to be evidence enough to suppose that he was not in favor of it – slavery was not a state to which most contemporary European Christians believed other European Christians deserved to be subjected. Notwithstanding the history of slavery being in large part colorblind, the institution had by the 18^th century become highly ethnocentric, with those to whom it continued to apply – i.e. non-European and non-Christian peoples, principally from Africa and Asia – considered spiritually, intellectually, and morally inferior to their civilized overlords. To be a slave, therefore, by the terms of Price’s likely audience, was to be unintelligent, brutish, and unprincipled, and essentially fit for no other life than perpetual servitude.

            This only entailed the contemporary view on individual enslavement, of course. It was Price’s belief that the enslavement of entire nations presented a worse prospect by far because the nature of the resulting master/supplicant dynamic was bound to be even more impersonal. Humiliating though it undoubtedly was, he affirmed accordingly, the enslavement of one individual to another at least presented the opportunity for intimate personal contact, and thus contained the possibility for the development of, “That fellow-feeling that takes place between persons in private life.” The country that found itself enslaved to another was comparatively at a loss to nurture this same potential for sympathy. “Being detached bodies that never see one another,” Price explained, “And residing perhaps in different quarters of the globe, the state that governs cannot be a witness to the sufferings occasioned by its oppressions; or a competent judge of the circumstances and abilities of the people who are governed.” This unfortunate state of affairs was likely to be made more troubling still, Price asserted, by the thoughtlessness inevitably resulting from such an arms-length relationship. Having doubtless taken on the administration of this distant province for the purpose of achieving some benefit for itself, the governing nation would have every reason to strain the resources of the subject nation beyond the point of comfort and possessed no convenient means by which to be made aware of – or pressing need to alleviate – the suffering that would likely result. “The more the one is loaded,” the author of Observations accordingly observed, “The more the other may be eased.” Again, though yet preferring to speak in general rather than specific terms, Price’s aim is not difficult to discern. The effect of the contemporary policy of Parliament to lay taxes upon a people that it did not represent – and for the purpose of paying off a debt to which they did not direct contribute – was to essentially strip them of their liberty without even the benefit of having their suffering accordingly observed.

            Price’s assertions became somewhat more pointed as this train of argument continued. Having put forward an ostensibly hypothetical scenario in which an otherwise free and sovereign state was made subject to the legislative authority of another, distant nation – the result being an inevitable conflict over which body could claim final and legitimate authority – he went on to describe a series of consequences that would have surely appeared strikingly familiar to a contemporary resident of British America. “In order to remedy this evil,” Price proposed,

And to give efficiency to its government, the supreme state will naturally be led to withdraw the Governor, the Council, and the Judges from the controul of the Province, by making them entirely dependent on itself for their pay and continuance in office, as well as for their appointment.

The author of Observations also proposed that this same hypothetical “supreme state” might further assert its control over the comparatively subordinate “Province” by attempting, “Under the pretence of the impossibility of gaining an impartial trial where government is resisted […] ordain, that offenders shall be removed from the Province to be tried within its own territories [,]” and may even go so far as, “Forbidding all meetings and associations of the people, except at such times, and for such particular purposes, as shall be permitted them.” In addition to representing a deplorable state of affairs on the part of the theoretical subject nation – their being left without recourse to justice or the means by which to publicly express their discontent – this series of punitive measures rather closely paralleled the actual policies visited upon British America between 1770 and 1776.

            Though the British sentries arrested and tried for their role in the events of the Boston Massacre (March 5^th, 1770) were ultimately acquitted in November of that year – thanks in large part to the defensive counsel of one John Adams (1735-1826) – contemporary British authorities remained skeptical that such an outcome might easily be repeated.  The notion of colonial courts trying British officials at a time when the Anglo-American relationship was experiencing a period of sustained tension evidently gave pause to certain members of the newly-installed government of Lord North (1732-1792). It was thus shortly thereafter proposed – ostensibly in response to complaints on the part of colonial jurists that their salaries were prohibitively low – that the yearly wage of American justices might be increased by transferring the responsibility for payment from the colonial legislatures to the His Majesty’s Treasury. Seeing in this offer an attack upon the independence of the colonial judiciary, all of the justices of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature – with the exception of Chief Justice Peter Oliver (1713-1791) – refused to take part. Shortly thereafter, in response to the so-called Boston Tea Party (December 5^th, 1773), the North Ministry attempted again to “protect” British magistrates and officers from the vagaries of American justice as part of a series of punitive measures. The resulting Administration of Justice Act (1774) declared, among other things, that, 

If it shall also appear, to the satisfaction of the said governor, or lieutenant-governor respectively, that an indifferent trial cannot be had within the said province, in that case, it shall and may be lawful for the governor, or lieutenant-governor, to direct, with the advice and consent of the council, that the inquisition, indictment, or appeal, shall be tried in some other of his Majesty's colonies, or in Great Britain [.]

Decried by members of the increasingly animated Massachusetts opposition as the “Murder Act” for the license they believed it would confer upon British officials to commit heinous crimes without fear of being tried by those they had injured, this piece of legislation served only to further threaten the integrity of the Anglo-American relationship. Unable to simply purchase legal impunity, it seemed the North Ministry had instead resolved to establish it by law.

            Evidently conscious of the resentment that such policies would inevitably engender, the government of Lord North also sought and received the passage of the Massachusetts Government Act during the same session of Parliament in the spring of 1774. This additional piece of legislation, like the aforementioned Administration of Justice Act, aimed to both punish the people of Massachusetts for the disrespect they had shown to the authority of Parliament and the Crown as well as prevent any future expression of discontent or disobedience. The act accordingly suspended the charter under which Massachusetts had been governed since 1691, erecting in its place a far more centralized administration wherein the Crown and its chosen Governor exercised unparalleled authority. The elected Executive Council – unique in British America – was replaced by a body to be appointed directly by the Crown, while a number of civil offices also customarily chosen by a college of voters were to be filled on the sole authority of the aforesaid Governor. Where this not draconian enough – serving effectively to isolate the popular, democratic element of the colonial government in the lower house of the legislature – the Massachusetts Government Act also prohibited the calling of town meetings without the consent of the colony’s chief executive.

Representing a form of local government unique to New England and a legislative platform among the most democratic in the contemporary British Empire, the town meeting had been a foundational element of socio-political organization in colonial American since the early 17^th century. Not only did the practice allow qualified citizens to freely express their opinions, concerns, or proposals in a space protected by law and tradition from censorship or interference, but it also served to commemorate and reaffirm the Puritan heritage of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the attendant social values of autonomy, community, and self-discipline. Notwithstanding the accordingly intense social and political significance of the town meeting, the text of the Massachusetts Government Act declared, 

Whereas a great abuse has been made of the power of calling such meetings, and the inhabitants have, contrary to the design of their institution, been misled to treat upon matters of the most general concern, and to pass many dangerous and unwarrantable resolves: for remedy whereof, be it enacted, That from and after the said first day of August, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-four, no meeting shall be called by the select men, or at the request of any number of freeholders of any township, district, or precinct, without the leave of the governor, or, in his absence, of the lieutenant-governor, in writing, expressing the special business of the said meeting [.]

To a great extent, the ability of town residents in colonial Massachusetts to attend to the administration of their communities – provided they met certain basic qualifications – symbolized precisely the kind of liberty Price described in Observations as finding its source and sustenance in the potential for autonomous action. The Massachusetts Government Act effectively foreclosed on this potential by placing an external barrier between the townsperson and their most basic, accessible, and efficacious public institution.

Beholden though town meeting attendees most certainly were to the laws of the colony and the authority of its Governor, they nevertheless maintained the right and the ability to both regulate the government likely to exert the most profound influence upon their daily lives and to speak freely within that same forum without fear of repression or punishment. Robbing these same citizens of the right to elect members of the Massachusetts Legislative Council – among other offices – undeniably represented a drastic reduction of their ability to direct the affairs of the colony in which they resided. But the reduction of the town meeting from a right to a privilege because certain attendees thereof had dared, “To treat upon matters of the most general concern” arguably symbolized a much crueler act of political and civil repression. Forbidden from freely governing the towns and villages from which Massachusetts itself was born – and from exercising control over the only branch of government many of them would ever encounter in the course of their lives – the affected colonists were left almost completely at the mercy of a legislature, a cabinet, and a monarch over which they could exercise no influence beyond which these same authorities deigned to admit. Such an utter and total loss of the liberty they had grown accustomed to thinking of as their birthright was indeed as close to slavery as any contemporary European subject of the British Crown was liable to experience.

And yet this, as Price asserted in his Observations, was not a punishment reserved only for those populations whose crimes against the state were too unspeakable to name. Nor did it have anything to do with the particular social, religious, of ethno-political characteristics of the affected communities. Rather, it was simply a consequence of one state claiming authority over another. Any nation, comprised of any assortment of peoples, located in any corner of the globe would be forced to contend with the same indignities and injustices were it the subject of another. Attempting to drive this point home – and to seemingly tease out the sense of Euro-centrism that was doubtless common among his prospective audience – Price went so far as to affirm that exactly this state of affairs would manifest itself were his own homeland for once in the role of subject rather than master. “Thus will such a Province be exactly in the same state that Britain would be in,” he accordingly declared,

Were our first executive Magistrate, our House of Lords, and our Judges, nothing but the instruments of a foreign democratical power; were our Juries nominated by that power; or were we liable to be transported to a distant country to be tried for offences committed here; and restrained from calling any meetings, consulting about any grievances, or associating for any purpose, except when leave should be given us by a Lord Lieutenant or Viceroy. 

The purpose of this scenario was almost certainly to shake British readers out of their sense of complacency by asking them to imagine what was effectively the unimaginable.

So accustomed had the average British subject more than likely become to thinking of America as some distant appendage of the Empire by rights wholly dependent on and subservient to the sitting government in Westminster, they could easily have digested the events of the Anglo-America crisis up through 1776 without ever once thinking about the practical effects of the policies being implemented on their behalf. Price sought to push through this habitual antipathy by rhetorically transposing the American plight onto Britain proper. Imagine, he asked his countrymen, if Parliament was forced to obey the dictates of another legislature some three thousand miles distant. Imagine Britain’s justices being appointed by a foreign monarch, its Prime Minister subject to dismissal by a council of foreign magistrates. Most galling yet, imagine the British people being unable to meet in any capacity – nationally or regionally, officially or informally – without first consulting the foreign administrator tasked with overseeing their domestic affairs. Could there be any gloss applied to such an arrangement to make it seem fair and just? Could any affirmation of the continued value of liberty and justice excuse the injuries done to the same? Would it make any difference at all to the benighted citizens of Great Britain to know that their overlords were themselves a fair, kind, and freedom-loving people whose own government was grounded upon the protection of certain basic civil rights?

Though Price did not answer on behalf of his fellow Britons, their response would seem easy enough to intuit. Surely, with nary an exception, they would have recoiled at even the idea that British citizens would ever acknowledge any authority save that of Parliament, the ministry, and the Crown. Their liberties were too dear to them, had been bought at too dear a price, and they would doubtless have died before suffering to have them compromised at the behest of some alien authority whose knowledge of affairs in Britain – owing mainly to physical distance – could not be much more than academic at the best of times. In spite of the likelihood of this visceral reaction being elicited, however, British citizens had been complicit in having exactly these measures takes against their countrymen in America since almost the beginning of the colonial project in the early 17^th century. Though they prided themselves as a culture on the personal and political freedoms that historical sacrifice had secured for their enjoyment, the average native-born resident of Great Britain more than likely thought nothing at all of depriving people of their own blood, heritage, and tradition of the same fundamental liberties simply because they did not live in Britain proper. It was precisely this quality of hypocrisy that Price hoped to bring to the attention of his readers, particularly by drawing to their attention the degree to which their own sentiments would have been aroused were the circumstances differently applied. “It is certain,” he accordingly asserted, “That this is a state of oppression which no country could endure, and to which it would be vain to expect that any people should submit an hour without an armed force to compel them.” As true as this was in Britain, Price endeavored to demonstrate to his audience that it was just as true in America.

Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Part V: That Old Whig Harangue, contd.

Richard Price, for his part, was much like his Country Party predecessors in his evident apprehensiveness as to the relationship between the moral deficiencies possessed by every human being and the manner in which certain governments so often seemed to sacrifice the interests of their constituents in favor of those of their officers and patrons. For the Country Party, the appropriate measures in response to such morally lax behavior tended towards specific programs or initiatives. They favored temperance, for example, doubtless in response to the dramatic rise in the popularity and consumption of gin that began in the 1680s, and Sabbatarianism as a means of combatting the increasing secularization of the Sunday observance. The success of these kinds of measures may not have exerted very much impact directly upon the public affairs of the British state, but their popularity among the partisans of the Country Party speaks to that faction’s particular understanding of the problems its members believed they were facing.

For one thing, it’s worth noting that these kinds of moral reform campaigns often originated from within Britain’s Non-Conformist communities. Whereas mainstream Anglicans appeared to be comparatively unconcerned with the sanctity of the Sabbath or the drinking habits of the lower classes, Quakers, Methodists, and Puritans (among others) viewed the moral behavior of their fellow citizens – and, in turn, of society in general – as being very much their business. Though effectively cordoned off by law from participating in a number of social and political activities, Britain’s Non-Conformist population nonetheless demonstrated a keen interest in shaping the character of the nation as a whole. The membership of the Country Party occupied a far from dissimilar space politically – being by definition outside of the Court Party and thus unable to grasp the reins of power – and at the same time nurtured a seemingly parallel attentiveness to the disposition of the larger social fabric. This apparent connection is far from coincidental. The Country Party drew much of its strength from the aforementioned Non-Conformist communities – there being a strong connection between the former’s desire to protect civil liberties and the latter’s desire to exercise them – and was substantially influenced by its moralizing tendencies in terms of the social problems it identified and the measures it supported to combat them. The objective sought by such initiatives – whether in the context of social advocacy or political opposition – was, essentially, purification.

Whether Britain’s Baptist or Methodists were permitted to sit in Parliament, or the partisans of the Country Party had effectively been exiled from the halls of power, they remained subject to the decisions of those in whom authority remained vested. Unable to affect change from without, therefore, they opted to do so from within by attempting to reform the character of their fellow citizens. Fewer Sabbath-breakers, they no doubt reasoned, and fewer drunkards – and generally fewer people willing to give in to their impulses – meant fewer people willing to behave selfishly or thoughtlessly, or willing to tolerate those in government who would. Richard Price’s similarly moralistic admonitions appeared to contemplate this same cause-and-effect relationship. Whereas the Country Party had sought to address specific social ills, however, Observations seemed instead to offer only a blanket exhortation in favor of greater individual self-discipline. Seeking to identify in every case the force which he believed stood opposed, “To the agent’s own will; and which, as far as it operates, produces Servitude [,]” Price thus declared that the power opposing moral liberty was, “The influence of passion getting the better of reason; or the brute overpowering and conquering the will of the man.” Failure to counter this influence, he later asserted, would inevitably transform a person otherwise capable of reason, honesty, and compassion into, “A wicked and detestable being, subject to the tyranny of base lusts, and the sport of every vile appetite.”

Price’s use of the word “tyranny” to describe the less noble impulses which act upon individual judgement would seem to very much embody his understanding of the moral dimension of liberty. Selfish impulses, to his thinking, were as much in need of correction as legal restraints upon speech, movement, faith, or political participation. Anything that restricted people from behaving as they consciously wished was a threat to both the well-being of the individual and the well-being of society and needed to be dealt with on that basis. The Country Party approach to this issue tended to be fairly structured. While lower taxes, frequent elections, and a decrease in the standing army all stood to reduce the ability of public institutions to exert pressure upon the lives and choices of Britain’s citizen population, moral reforms like temperance and Sabbatarianism stood to accomplish the same goal by (hopefully) reducing the ability of humanity’s fundamental attraction to vice to transform otherwise virtuous individuals into either corrupt pseudo-tyrants or ignoble and abject slaves. The text of Richard Price’s Observations strongly indicates that he was no less dedicated to this basic program than his Country Party – or Old Whig, or Patriot – predecessors, though his focus was admittedly narrower. Again, though the moral liberty of his fellow citizens most certainly concerned him, it was not his primary focus. Self-disciple was undoubtedly a virtue he sought to encourage in a general sense – particularly among those in whom significant authority was vested – but there were certain socio-political ills that a sense of personal restraint simply could not alleviate. A government, for example, whose members believed it was in both their own rational self-interest and that of the nation they administered to curtail the civil liberties of certain of their constituents could not necessarily be said to suffer from a lack of self-control. Price’s awareness of this state of affairs doubtless shaped his approach within the text of Observations, leading to a focus on civil liberties and only a passing – though no less telling – reference to the socio-political dangers of excessive moral turpitude.        

   

            Intent though he plainly was on the practical, physical, and legal impediments to individual liberty over the rather murkier notion of moral tyranny, it nonetheless bears noting that even the more pragmatic elements of the Country Party program that Price appeared to echo in the text of Observations represented a somewhat fantastical proposition. As discussed above, the version of Britain that the original country men appointed themselves to defend in the late 17^th century had been seriously eroded by the turn of the 18^th century, and had more or less disappeared by the time their influence began to wane in the 1740s. By that time, the institutions against which they most often arrayed themselves – the Bank of England and the Royal Army – had more than proved their value by facilitating the physical expansion of the British Empire, the growth of its trade, the modernization of its economy, and the enhancement of its global reputation. By the 1750s and 1760s, wars with France and Spain having led to even greater gains in the colonial battlegrounds of India and America, there could be no denying that the institutional innovations that took place in the wake of the Glorious Revolution had almost completely shifted the fortunes of the British people in a manner theretofore likely unfathomable. That this transformation – and the successes that it wrought – was ultimately embraced even by those who had spoken against it in an earlier era is especially telling. The aforementioned William Pitt, whose leadership of the Patriot Whigs and accompanying calls for greater transparency in government had famously made him a thorn in the side of the Walpole Ministry in the 1730s, had no qualms about using the same fiscal-military apparatus he had earlier cited as a tool of personal enrichment to prosecute an exceedingly successful war against Britain’s colonial rivals as co-leader of a government with the Duke of Newcastle (1693-1768) in the 1750s. Sincere though Pitt and his fellow Patriots may have been in their accusations of corruption and malfeasance, their issue was evidently no longer with the Bank itself, or the Army itself. Rather, when they found fault, it was with the manner in which these institutions were used.

            Though he was politically almost certainly a Pittite himself, Richard Price gave every indication in the text of his Observations that he was far less sanguine as to the value of these selfsame institutions than Pitt himself seemed to be. Whereas the so-called “Great Commoner” had used the financial resources of the Bank of England and the firmness and stability of the Royal Army to great effect in a war with against Britain’s perennial continental enemies, Price actively characterized, “The terror of the standing army, the danger of the public funds, and the all-corrupting influence of the treasury,” as standing in opposition to the sense of virtue he believed his fellow citizens ought to display when faced with “a sycophant of power” of the kind they had twice disposed of in the previous century. Not only does this appear to separate Price from most of his fellow Whigs – who had every reason, by the 1770s, to see the fiscal-military apparatus of the contemporary British Empire as a source of strength rather than danger – but it would seem to have separated him from the mainstream of Britain’s political culture as a whole. While it was doubtless common in certain corners of contemporary public discourse to maintain a degree of skepticism as to the powers at the disposal of the executive branch of the government – to wonder, for example, whether it was strictly necessary to vest quite so much authority in quite so few hands – few people who were particularly engaged with the political events of the 1770s in Britain would called into question the very nature of the 18^th century empire.

Yet Price appeared to do just that. Perhaps this made him naïve, though the degree of his naivety would seem to depend on how sincerely he believed the Britain of the Glorious Revolution could realistically be restored. It almost certainly made him stubborn, adamant as he was about the corrosive nature of socio-political institutions whose usefulness to the British state had been proven over the course of decades. It very likely made him an idealist, believing as he seemingly did that his fellow citizens could and would reject ease, luxury, and power if often enough reminded that theirs was a culture built upon liberty. If nothing else, however, it most certainly made him vigilant. Unable to take for granted that Britain’s growth from kingdom to empire was in all respects beneficial to its citizens, Price appeared to instead embrace an ardent and thorough skepticism of the core elements of that growth. The program previously advocated by the Country Party – and later adopted and modified by their successors – provided a useful framework for this suspicion of established authority, particularly as it focused upon the shortcomings of the Bank of England and the Royal Army. The moment had passed, of course, during which it might have reasonably been expected that these institutions could be reined in or even eliminated, but that was perhaps not as significant as it might now appear. As the text of his Observations made quite clear, Price did not necessarily need to believe that late 17^th century Britain could be resurrected in the late 18^th century to make very cogent observations as to the state of British political culture. Corruption remained an impediment to good policy. The shareholders of the Bank of England held an inordinate amount of public influence for an unelected body. The Army was ripe for abuse. Parliament was unrepresentative. However likely it was that any of these issues would be addressed simply for the asking – and however grounded may or may not have been the ideology that necessitated calling them to the public’s attention – they were most definitely worth being aware of all the same.      

Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Part IV: That Old Whig Harangue, contd.

Based on the various convictions and statements cited thus far, a definite image emerges from the text of Observations of Richard Price as being distinctly disconnected from many of the socio-political norms of his time and place. His desire for constituency reform was certainly novel, unusual, and even progressive for the era. It would not be until 1832 that even the beginnings of parliamentary redistricting would start to take place. But his distrust of one of the centerpieces of the British Empire’s exceedingly successful 18^th century was rather the opposite of forward thinking. Well-intentioned though his criticism of its influence undoubtedly were, it would have been difficult in 1776 to convince anyone who wasn’t convinced already that the military and economic expansion resulting from the incorporation of the Bank of England represented a net loss for the integrity of the British state. And even if it had been possible to shift public and elite opinion alike against the Bank – to the point of either revoking its charter or refusing its renewal – who could say what the economic consequences would ultimately be? Britain had changed drastically between 1694 and 1776. Not only had the population grown by over a million people, but the first stirrings of what would become the Industrial Revolution had begun to radically transform such fields as mining, smelting, textiles, and chemical engineering. Access to raw materials like cotton, iron, and coal were as valuable to this process as the availability of viable export markets, both of which were made possible by bank loans, government sponsorship, and joint-stock subscriptions in colonial trading companies. Putting aside the dominant position that Britain would soon enough come to enjoy within an increasingly integrated global economy, British firms – and, in turn, the Treasury – had already substantially benefited from rising revenues and an expanding customer base. The sudden credit crunch that would inevitably result from the disappearance of the Bank of England would almost certainly have occasioned a massive economic recession from which the British state would struggle mightily to recover. And in the end, even if recovery was not only possible but accomplished, pre-1694 England would not magically reappear. The die was cast, whether Price liked it or not.

This is not to say, of course, that there was no longer any purpose to surveying the continued evolution of British society and politics with a critical– and at times even caustic – eye. Doubtless Price understood this – divorced from the realities of the contemporary British state though his convictions may have been – and sought to offer his particularly idealistic take on the ideal character of representative government as a counterbalance to what he knew to be the worst aspects of contemporary public affairs. Consider, to that end, a passage from around the middle of Part I, Section II. In seeking to describe what he considered to be a reasonable frame of government that offset liberty with stability, Price wrote that,

In order to form the most perfect constitution of government, there may be reasons for joining so such a body of representatives, an Hereditary Council, consisting of men of the first rank in the state, with a Supreme executive Magistrate at the head of all. This will form useful checks in a legislature; and contribute to give it vigour, union, and dispatch, without infringing liberty; for, as long as that part of a government which represents the people is a fair representation; and also has a negative on all public measures, together with the sole power of imposing taxes and originating supplies; the essentials of liberty will be preserved.     

                                         

Note here both Price’s evident appreciation for balance in government and his emphasis on “fair representation.” What he ultimately desired for his homeland, it seemed, was simply that it adhere – perhaps somewhat more faithfully than appeared to be the case – to the form of government time and tradition had blessed it with. Unpopular though the notion might have been, constituency reform was thus likely intended by Price to strengthen this existing administrative framework – to make it “fair” in a way that it perhaps had been originally but was no longer. Time could not be turned back on the state of British politics, but the core purpose of government might be rejuvenated by a somewhat more conscientious approach. That these were Price’s aspirations rather than his observations is made clear by the coda he appended to the above citation. “We make it out boast in this country,” he affirmed, “That this is our own constitution. I will not say with how much reason.”

            Mixing somewhat caustic weariness with more spirited rhetoric was more or less standard procedure for Price throughout the text of his Observations. At the same time he endeavored to arouse his readers’ pride or anger he seemed as keen to sting their egos or wound their dignity. This was particularly the case when he was endeavoring to articulate some aspect or other of the aforementioned Country Party creed. Opposition to centralized authority, he thus affirmed at the end of Part I, Section II, was not only sensible, but formed a fundamental part of contemporary Britain’s history and identity. Having first quoted the aforementioned Montesquieu – “Sleep in a state […] is always followed by slavery” – Price went on to declare that,

The people of this kingdom were once warmed by sentiments such as those. Many a sycophant of power have they sacrificed. Often have they fought and bled in the cause of Liberty. But that time seems to be going. The fair inheritance of Liberty left us by our ancestors many of us are not unwilling to resign.   

Consider, here, Price’s appeal to his countrymen’s shared sense of self-respect. Putting aside his impulse to quote a Frenchman – ever a questionable choice when addressing an English audience – the reason he sought to recollect Britain’s libertarian past is quite obvious. Simply telling his readers that unchecked executive authority was dangerous, and expecting them to take his word for it, could only achieve so much. Reminding them, conversely, that the nation they knew, loved, and profited by was born upon a foundation of aggressively rejecting arbitrary authority would have been that much harder to ignore.

The original 17^th century “country men” had been given to adopting the same tack because history had so recently furnished them – between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the overthrow of James II in 1688 – with examples of the unwillingness of the British people to suffer the whims of unrepresentative power. Price was perhaps not so lucky, though both of these events loomed large in the formation of the contemporary British state. In consequence, while those that were still reverent of the generation of their forebears who took it upon themselves to rid their islands of a brace of grasping monarchs would doubtless had felt themselves stirred by Price’s commemoration, the remainder would be made to suffer a slur or two against their comparative indolence. “The fair inheritance of Liberty left us by our ancestors,” Price thus affirmed, “Many of us are not unwilling to resign.” This was perhaps not the harshest rebuke the author of Observations might have offered, but it almost certainly appealed to his own ideological priorities. He and his countrymen had been left something infinitely precious by their predecessors – i.e. a love of Liberty and the means to defend it – and were squandering it with every right their collectively refused to assert. There could be no greater crime.

The depth of Price’s feeling on the matter was made yet clearer by his assessment of contemporary Britain’s sense of “public virtue.” Continuing on from the passage cited above, he proceeded to lament that,

Should any events ever arise that should render the opposition necessary that took place in the times of King Charles the First, and James the Second, I am afraid all that is valuable to us would be lost. The terror of the standing army, the danger of the public funds, and the all-corrupting influence of the treasury, would deaden all zeal, and produce general acquiescence and servility.

Here was Price willing not only to call the specific attention of his audience to the events that had served to inspire the Country Party of antiquity, but he also named two of that same faction’s perennial bogeymen – the standing army and the financial elite – as yet still standing in opposition to the free and unfettered enjoyment of the liberty that was their birthright. In so doing, the author of Observations effectively accomplished two objectives at once. First, he offered a somewhat more cutting appraisal of the state of contemporary British political consciousness than had theretofore been the case. More than being merely lackadaisical in defending their inheritance, Price accused some unspoken portion of his countrymen of cowardice, servility, and corruption. Second, he made it clear to his audience – in the 21^st century as well as the 18^th – that his assessment of the gravest threats facing the contemporary British state was substantially the same as that of the Country Party. Some eighty years after its incorporation, the Bank of England and its coterie of financiers yet loomed in Price’s mind as an enemy of the values he regarded as underpinning British liberty. Just so, over a century past its formation, the peacetime British army still seemed to him to be antithetical to the essential character of British citizenship and political identity.

            Not all of Price’s Country Party tendencies spoke quite so fundamentally to the very foundations of contemporary British statehood, of course. Some, while nonetheless appearing to confirm his strong personal affinity for that 17^th century political movement, seemed comparatively to entail social rather than ideological preferences. Moral reform, for example, though very much topic of concern for the original 17^th-century country men, did not necessarily involve the same kind of rejection of institutional innovation that arguably defined so much of the Country Party program. Just so, while Price’s emphasis on personal discipline as a guarantor of liberty very much paralleled his predecessors’ ardent moralizing, it, too, seemed to embody an ancillary rather than fundamental concern. Price’s interest, after all, had to do with the nature of civil liberty, as the title of his treatise made perfectly clear. What he referred to as “moral liberty” was certainly a matter of consequence to him – or else he would not have mentioned it at all – but not to the degree that he seemed inclined to discuss it at length. That being said, the observations he did offer are worth exploring all the same.

            Consider, for example, Price’s characterization of passion as being a kind of despotism from which the individual must struggle to escape if they wish to be truly free. Having already explained to his readers at the beginning of Part I, Section I that the fundamental concept of liberty embodied individual freedom from being acted upon by a force or forces that said individual cannot control, Price proceeded to affirm that, “He whose perceptions of moral obligation are controuled by his passions has lost his Moral Liberty; and the most common language applied to him is, that he wants Self-government.” While this might strike the modern reader as something of a non-sequitur in the context of a discussion about the nature of liberty in a political society – individual autonomy being most often threatened in such cases by an outside force – the rationale underlying Price’s association of moral freedom with civil freedom is not so difficult to discern. Liberty, as defined in the text of Observations, was as much a means as an end, with its moral dimension acting as strongly upon the state of human civilization as its physical, civil, or religious aspects. Free, in short, was better than unfree, and it was worth nurturing the former regardless of the nature of the forces that stood to restrain it.

            In approaching the topic of liberty, the author of Observations accordingly concerned himself at the outset with defining how and why a society might take specific steps to protect the autonomy of its members against all manner of restraint. “Without Physical Liberty,” he declared, “Man would be a machine acted upon by mechanical springs, having no principle of motion in himself or command over events; and, therefore incapable of all merit and demerit.” The implication of this passage seem to be that reducing humankind to a race of such thoughtless, artless, mindless beasts would  have been to the detriment of the species as a whole. Just so, Price’s assertion that, “Without Religious and Civil Liberty he is a poor and abject animal […] bending his neck to the yoke, and crouching to the will of every silly creature who has the insolence to pretend to authority over him [,]” drew a clear connection between the functional autonomy of the individual and their willingness to subject themselves to the will of another. Reduced to a state of spiritual servitude, communities who might otherwise have flourished and innovated would be effectively enslaved to those for whom power alone was the only end worth pursuing. Moral liberty, while embodying an internal rather than external struggle, contemplated the same fundamental object. Those who are free of their baser impulses – a force which, though we can learn to ignore, we cannot control – are capable of expressing their autonomy in a way that simply isn’t possible were they wholly sunk in their passions. While this maxim might seem to describe a conflict of personal significance only, it takes on a larger, public importance when one considers the impact of human failings like temptation, greed, and arrogance upon the public affairs of a state.

Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Part III: That Old Whig Harangue, contd.

At around the mid-point of the aforementioned Part I, Section II of Observations, Richard Price put forward a rather pointed interpretation of the kind of “degenerated” government he believed would result from a break in the essential connection between public institutions and the general population. “But if they are chosen,” he affirmed, referring to the delegates intended to represent the needs of the public,

For long terms by a part only of the state; and if during that term they are subject to no controul from their constituents; the very idea of Liberty will be lost, and the power of chusing constituents becomes nothing but a power, lodged in a few, to chuse, at certain periods, a body of Masters for themselves and for the rest of the Community. And if a state is so sunk that the body of representatives are elected by a handful of the meanest persons in it, whose votes are always paid for; and if also, there is a higher will on which even these mock representatives themselves depend, and that directs their voices: In these circumstances, it will be an abuse of language to say that the state possesses Liberty.

Begging forgiveness for the length of the above citation, a number of the ideas expressed therein are worth exploring in greater depth.

The ideal term of office of members of Parliament, for instance, was a specific point of contention within the traditional Country/Court dichotomy. Whereas the latter preferred longer period between elections – normally between seven years and five years – the most ardent partisans of the former argued that the best means of ensuring that MPs remained in touch with the needs of their constituents was to have them sit for only one year at a time. As this would have represented a radical departure from the established traditions of English/British representative government, it was not adopted at any point between the pinnacle of Country Party influence in the 1720s and the time of Price’s writing in the mid-1770s. While this accordingly made it something less than a novel proposal at the time Observations was published, it was at also something more than a dead issue. Certainly Price would not have counted himself among the socio-political mainstream by thus advocating for the annual election of MPs, but nor could it be denied that the issue at hand – i.e. legislative accountability – remained an ongoing concern. Of similar provenance was Price’s fear that the task of selecting representatives to sit in Parliament might conceivably become the privilege of, “The few […] whose votes are always paid for [.]”

The contemporary Parliament of Great Britain, it bears recalling, had become fairly unrepresentative by the end of the 18^th century. Constituency boundaries had remained largely static since the Medieval era, in spite of population growth and internal migration, resulting in a number of so-called “rotten boroughs” that continued to elect MPs in spite of the fact that their qualified voting populations had declined to single digit numbers. The perhaps inevitable consequence of this radical power imbalance – i.e. thousands of people sharing a single representative in one district while less than ten in another had two MPs between them – was that certain seats in Parliament became the exclusive property of the local landed gentry. Customarily, these seats were either assigned to family members or allies of the landlord in question or they were sold to whoever was willing to pay the appropriate price. Having to buy or intimidate only a handful of voters, these borough lords were thus able to increase their influence in Parliament, reward their children or their friends with prestigious public offices, or else enrich themselves at the expense of those who were comparatively under-represented. As the 18^th century transitioned into the 19^th century, the manifest injustice of this arrangement would only grow worse. In response to the economic and demographic forces unleashed by the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution (c.1760-1840), formerly middling urban centers like Manchester and Birmingham would grow by leaps and bounds, often at the expense of neighboring rural boroughs. As constituency boundaries remained unchanged, the result was further underrepresentation of Great Britain’s growing urban population and the continued overrepresentation of its landed elites.  

Ironically enough, though Price appeared to identify both with the traditions of the Country Party and contemporary agitators for parliamentary reform, it was the rural gentry from which the former originated that benefited directly from the existence of the aforementioned rotten boroughs. Consider, by way of example, the case of Old Saurm. A former cathedral town which gradually became deserted over the course of the 13^th and 14^th centuries, the borough continued to elect two MPs even once it ceased to contain any permanent residents. The designated households – which had become essentially a legal fiction by the end of the 17^th century – were assigned by the local landlord whenever it came time to vote. Elections in Old Sarum were thus wholly pro forma affairs, conducted more for the look of the thing than because there was any need to determine whom its “residents” would send to Westminster. Bizarre though this arrangement may have been, however, the thing about Old Saurm that makes it especially curious in hindsight is that for many years it was the personal property of the influential Pitt family. Having purchased the relevant land in Wiltshire in the 1670s, East India merchant Thomas Pitt (1652-1726) proceeded to both hold the seat himself and grant it to his son Robert Pitt (1680-1727). Robert’s son – also named Thomas Pitt (1705-1761) – later came into possession of the Old Sarum properties, upon which he, too, took one of the accompanying seats in Parliament or else assigned it to his younger brother. This is worth noting because the younger son of Robert Pitt was none other than William Pitt (1708-1778), Whig luminary and noted critic of the Walpole Ministry who made a career of opposing the centralization of power in the cabinet and championed the traditional liberties and prerogatives of Parliament.

Not only was William Pitt one of the most influential Whig statesmen of his era – having led Britain, alongside the Duke of Newcastle (1693-1768), to a successful conclusion in the Seven Years War (1754-1763) – but he had been one of the leaders of the “Patriots,” a political faction in the mold of the Country Party whose avowed enemies were corruption, ministerial tyranny, and political patronage. Richard Price, it should by now almost go without saying, was very much of this same ideological persuasion. Price’s patron Lord Shelburne was one of Pitt’s closest allies in Parliament, he hosted Pitt in his home in Newington Green more than once during his residence there, and his opposition to political centralization, government corruption, and the influence of banking on politics placed him squarely in the contemporary Pittite camp. In spite of the fact that Pitt was himself the beneficiary of 18^th century Britain’s unrepresentative Parliament, however, the text of Observations makes it clear that Price was very much in favor of constituency reform. As given voice in the passage cited above, his desire seemed generally to be amenable to the Country Part/Patriot position – i.e. that Parliament ought to represent the whole of Great Britain rather just the wealthy magnates whose personal fortunes helped fund the government’s debt. Doubtless Pitt himself would have raised no objection. The same perhaps could not be said of Price’s caution that, “The very idea of Liberty will be lost, and the power of chusing constituents becomes nothing but a power, lodged in a few, to chuse, at certain periods, a body of Masters for themselves and for the rest of the Community.”

Pitt, for better or worse, was one of those few, and one of those masters. Whatever he had made of his career in public service – i.e. a great deal – it undeniably began when he used the rotten borough that his grandfather had purchased in the 1670s to become the MP for Old Sarum in 1735. This was, of course, a matter of public record. By that it should be taken as a given that Price was aware of the fact itself. From this seeming contradiction – Price being a friend and ally, in his battle against corruption and for reform, of a man who benefitted directly from the unreformed state of Britain’s political institutions – one might fairly extrapolate that not every conviction he held and expressed coordinated exactly with those nurtured by the traditional currents of opposition thought. Price was most definitely influenced by the earlier agitations of the Country Party. And he was also almost certainly among the Patriot Whigs that emerged in opposition to the centralizing Walpole governments of the 1730s and 1740s. But none of these associations or influences should be imagined to have restrained him from adopting positions that were more radical than – or that even defied the power – the foundering members of these very same factions. Price was, after all, a Non-Conformist Protestant minister whose youth was shaped by that community’s necessary penchant for self-reliance. It perhaps also bears noting that a number of his friends and allies – the aforementioned women’s rights campaigner Elizabeth Montagu, for example, or the chemist and metaphysical theorist Joseph Priestly – were supporters of the kinds of radical socio-political improvement that would have caused even the generally liberal Whig mainstream to raise a skeptical eyebrow. While it is therefore far from inaccurate to describe much of what Price advocated for in the text of Observations as falling within the established orthodoxy of the Country Party and its successors, this assertion should not be held to apply to every conviction he expressed therein. 

That being said, it would be difficult to read Price’s warning that if, in the context of a elected legislature, “There is a higher will on which even these mock representatives themselves depend, and that directs their voices: In these circumstances, it will be an abuse of language to say that the state possesses Liberty [,]” without being reminded very distinctly of one of the Country Party’s principle complaints. By their reckoning – as by that of the Patriots, the Old Whigs, and whatever other pseudo-populist opposition group was then making waves – the greatest threat to the liberties of the British citizen was the usurpation of the authority of the traditional elite at the hands of a shadowy cabal of bankers, merchants, and bureaucrats. These financial and mercantile interests notably included the directors and shareholder of the Bank of England, none of whom were appointed by or accountable to either Parliament or its constituents. In spite of being functionally a private venture, the Bank had become – since its inception in 1694 – integral to the fiscal-military apparatus of the contemporary British Empire. Its loans funded expansions of the army and the navy, it sold shares in joint-stock ventures that often depended on government support and included cabinet ministers among their shareholders, and it managed the national debt on behalf of the Treasury. It was thus have been far from alarmist or excessive to say that the Bank held a fair bit of sway with whatever government happened to hold the confidence of the sitting House of Commons.

This state of affairs understandably made people of a certain persuasion anxious. One of the fundamental principles of the British Constitution – affirmed most recently during the Glorious Revolution (1688) – was that there existed in Britain no authority superior to that of Parliament. Even the Crown, for all its accustomed prerogatives, was bound by the laws that the House of Commons and the House of Lords collectively affirmed. While the mere existence of the Bank of England didn’t necessarily call this precept into question – though it perhaps bears noting that the Glorious Revolution occurred before the Bank was chartered – the effect of its existence certainly seemed to threaten the erosion of its validity in practice. Parliament may well have remained legally superior, but what was that superiority worth if governments were functionally bound to conduct all of their financial business through a privately owned and operated corporation? What did it matter that Parliament’s laws were paramount if the unelected directors and shareholders of the Bank of England could determine their character by threatening to withhold critical loans? The events of the 18^th century – during which the British economy expanded and industrialized at the same time that its military seemed to engage in one sustained conflict after another – begged exactly these kinds of questions, particularly as Britain’s colonial empire grew and its financial commitments in North America, the Caribbean, and particularly India increased. In light of how wealthy the British state had become, and how much of that wealth the Bank’s funding had made possible, it would have been far from idle to wonder to what extent Parliament alone – and though its members, the voting public – continued to shape public policy.

That Richard Price gave voice to precisely this anxiety in his published Observations – printed, again, in the early months of 1776 – accordingly says a great deal about his ideological convictions and the way that he viewed the state of public affairs in contemporary Britain. As discussed above, the Bank of England had been around for over eighty years by the time of Price’s writing. In that time it had more than proven its usefulness to Britain’s governing elite. Facing an incipient rebellion in the Thirteen Colonies – and having just concluded a tremendously expensive war with its most powerful continental rivals – the prospect of paying out the necessary costs would doubtless have seemed inconceivable without the loans that the Bank could guarantee. For Price to nonetheless lament the supposed influence of a “higher will” upon the affairs of state would thus seem to place him at odds with a long-established status quo on which far too much had come to depend for a reversal to realistically be made. Perhaps the Bank had indeed taken to exerting more sway over public policy than was strictly healthy in a society that continued to pride itself on its regard for individual liberty. But Price would have been among the minority of those who continued to identify themselves as Whigs whose convictions would evidently not allow them to see the Bank as anything other than a threat. It would thus appear reasonably fair to characterize him as a particularly ardent – and, in some sense, retrograde – devotee of at least this core aspect of the traditional Country Party ideology.