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 20th, 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.
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