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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pursuant to his intention of deconstructing and refuting the logic of the contemporary British government’s ongoing campaign to quell the incipient American Revolution, Richard Price laid out a map of his planned critique in the introduction to Part II Observations. That segment of his treatise, he explained, would be divided into five sections, each dealing with a different dimension of the North Ministry’s approach to the aforesaid colonial revolt.

Section I, entitled “On the Justice of the War with America,” would seek to determine to what degree taking up arms against the restive colonies comported with contemporary Anglo-American notions of what was just, equitable, and reasonable within the context of the relationship between a people and their nominal government. Section II, called “Whether the War with America is justified by the Principles of the Constitution,” would endeavor to examine this same subject from the perspective of the principles, history, and traditions of the British Constitution. Section III, labelled “Of the Policy of the War with America,” would tend towards a somewhat more practical subject than the previous two, seeking to explore the degree to which the policy of successive British governments truly aligned with their stated objective to preserve law and order in America and promote closer ties between that realm and Britain proper. Section IV, entitled “Of the Honor of the Nation, as affected by the War with America,” would attempt to examine the way in which the dignity of the British government and people had supposedly become entwined with their ability to maintain the accustomed relationship between Britain and America. And Section V, named “Of the Probability of Succeeding in the War with America,” would seek to determine whether or not it was even possible for the policies then being advocated by the North Ministry to achieve anything like a status quo ante bellum within the context of the Anglo-American relationship. Under each heading, Price sought principally to counter common arguments made in favor of both America’s continued loyalty towards the British Empire and the war then being waged ostensibly to preserve the same. His tone, throughout, was decidedly skeptical; his aim, unmistakably, to debunk and disabuse.

In aid of this objective, Price also deployed a kind of admonition in the opening paragraphs of Part II which he believed his readers would have done well to consider. Endeavoring to push his audience away from either measuring the present dilemma against, “The practice of former times” or from considering the liberties claimed by the American colonies strictly within the context of their respective governing charters, Price explained that the reality of the present relationship between Britain and America was almost entirely without precedent in the history of human affairs. “The case of a free country branching itself out in the manner Britain has done,” he declared,

And sending to a distant world colonies which have there, from small beginnings, and under free legislatures of their own, increased, and formed a body of powerful states, likely soon to become superior to the parent state […] is a case which is new in the history of mankind; and it is extremely improper to judge of it by the rules of any narrow and partial policy; or to consider it on any other ground than the general one of reason and justice.

There was a fair bit of wisdom in this assertion. While the nucleus of the contemporary British state – i.e. England – had undergone a reasonably steady process of expansion and consolidation since at least the High Middles Ages, the stage of that progression which commenced with the beginnings of the English colonial project at the end of the 16^th century was practically and fundamentally different than those which preceded it.

Wales, for example, had been conquered by English armies in the 1280s and granted representation in Parliament via the Law in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542. Scotland entered into a de facto partnership with England upon the ascension to the English throne of James I (1566-1625) in 1603 and was fully amalgamated with the same by the terms of the Act of Union in 1707. Ireland, meanwhile, was invaded by the Normans in the 1170s and by the 1290s was possessed of a Parliament of its own whose membership and jurisdiction was separate from that which sat in Westminster. In spite of periodic attempts to govern to the contrary, therefore, all of these regions could accordingly be said to have enjoyed a long history of political representation by the time of Price’s writing in the late 1770s. Granted, the Irish Parliament was inarguably subservient to its counterpart in Great Britain, and the period between the annexation of Wales to England and the recognition of Welsh political rights under English law did last for the better part of three centuries. All the same, by 1776 it could not be argued that any of these territories lacked legislative representation of some sort, or that their relationship to the government of Great Britain was little better than that of master and subject. The establishment of the Roanoke Colony in what is now Virginia in 1585 – while not itself a successful venture – represented the beginning of an enterprise whose nature and dynamics were, by comparison, less concerned with constitutional scruples and accordingly more prone to lingering questions about sovereignty, authority, and law.

Putting aside Scotland – which was peacefully merged with England to form the Kingdom of Great Britain – Wales and Ireland were both conquered by English armies and subject to occupation and annexation. In consequence, both of these territories represented prizes as much as constituent regions of an expanding English state. They and their inhabitants were thus not infrequently treated like property under the terms of English law. Distressing though this surely was, contemporary practice did not militate against it. By the standards of the era, the relevant English governments were under no formal obligation to recognize the civil liberties of either the Welsh or Irish peoples. When this recognition eventually came, however – via the incorporation of one into England proper and the establishment in the other of a parallel government – it was accomplished in a manner at least nominally consistent with contemporary constitutional norms. Rather than attempt to continue governing Wales and/or Ireland without seeing that their populations were represented on the same basis as that of England – an outcome which, it bears repeating, contemporary English law would not have scoffed at – the relevant governments took measures to ensure that English law applied consistently to all subjects of the Crown. The proximity of the regions in question to England doubtless made this easy enough, and the recurrence of civil unrest in the same surely made it a needful outcome as well. Thus was Wales incorporated into England proper – allowing its inhabitants access to the same legal protections and guarantees as their English counterparts – and a separate Parliament established for Ireland – which recognized the same rights and adhered to the same basic practices as its English equivalent. Conquest, it may therefore fairly be said, in due time gave way to the Constitution.  

England’s – and later Great Britain’s – colonization of America conversely involved a process of peaceful settlement whereby the inhabitants of the territories in question lived at a great distance from the center of power in London, were the descendants of English/British subjects or were subjects themselves, and were at no point the subjects of a campaign of invasion and conquest. The original inhabitants of colonial Jamestown, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Pennsylvania, or the Plymouth Colony thus differed materially from their Irish and Welsh predecessors in that their relationship to the government and laws of England/Britain was not thrust upon them at the tip of a sword. They departed their homeland as subjects of the Crown in good standing – or near enough, depending on the faith they professed – erected new structures of government under the nominal auspices of this same central authority – via the issuance of colonial charters – and freely acknowledged the authority of the associated legislature – i.e. Parliament – within the realms of trade and defense. Far from foreigners who were brought into the imperial fold by force, they might thereby best be described as migrant-adventurers who aimed – among other things – to expand the reach of English/British culture into a region of the globe previously unknown to the same. This same migration, however, also removed them from even the possibility of representation in Parliament, thus creating a situation – as Price aptly observed – theretofore unseen in the history of the English/British Empire.

Neither a conquered people nor slaves, and yet also incapable of enjoying the same rights afforded to their British-resident counterparts, the inhabitants of British America existed in a legal and philosophical space that Britain proper did not recognize because it never had to previously. Non-citizen subject populations had always become citizens eventually, or else came to enjoy protection from authorities they could not acknowledge as their own. America was not fit for the one, while the other – i.e. a strict separation of the powers of Parliament and the Crown from those of the individual colonial governments – would function only to the extent that British authorities would allow. Such an ad-hoc arrangement certainly benefited the central government in question, permitting it the flexibility to interpret its relationship with the various colonial governments on the basis of what, at any given moment, it needed said relationship to be. There were customs, of course, and norms to which Parliament and the Crown commonly adhered in their dealings with Britain’s various American dependencies, but none of it was truly binding, or based on much more than what was momentarily expedient. Price thus rightly entreated his readers not to consider the conflict just then unfolding between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies, “On any other ground than the general one of reason and justice.” The few precedents that did exist within the history of the English/British Empire for the expansion of the same concerned situations too unlike Britain’s colonization of America to be of any relevance in 1776. And the decisions that had been made during the establishment and growth of Britain’s American dependencies vis-à-vis their relationship with Parliament and the Crown could hardly be considered precedents at all. What mattered, on the contrary, was whether or not Britain’s actions towards the Thirteen Colonies, in the lead up to hostilities and during their commencement, were consistent with the most basic measures of justice, integrity, humanity, and reason.

Price’s resulting attempt to systematically explore these same concepts as they related to the North Ministry’s efforts to quell the ongoing rebellion in America began simply enough. At the outset of the aforementioned Part II, Section I, he set the direction of what would follow by seeking to determine, as plainly as possible, what it was the British government was fighting to maintain. To that end, he hit upon a statement issued by said government which seemed to sum up the thrust of its position while leaving vague any supporting evidence. Quoting from the text of the American Colonies Act (1766) – perhaps more commonly known as the Declaratory Act – Price thus relayed that it was the evident conviction of the North Ministry, “That this kingdom has power, and of right ought to have power to make laws and statutes to bind the Colonies, and people of America, in all cases whatever.” After first admitting that most of his countrymen, “Will be for using milder language; and for saying no more than, that the united legislatures of England and Scotland have of right power to tax the Colonies, and a supremacy of legislation over America [,]” Price proceeded to marvel at the implications of such a doctrine of authority. “If it means any thing,” he thus affirmed,

It means, that the property, and the legislations of the Colonies, are subject to the absolute discretion of Great Britain, and ought of right to be so. The nature of the thing admits no limitation. The Colonies can never be admitted to be judges, how far the authority over them in these cases shall extend. This would be to destroy it entirely,–If any part of their property is subject to our discretion, the whole must be so […] It is self-evident, that this leaves them nothing they can call their own.

Forgoing any declaration on his part as to the justice of this arrangement – his readers might now have fairly guessed where it was he came down on the matter – Price proceeded to ask perhaps the most cogent question his government could conceivably have faced. “What is it that can give to any people such a supremacy over another people?” he inquired. Many answers had been offered, it seemed, and from many different quarters. Price thereafter proceeded to address them each in turn.

            Unity, Price avowed, embodied one such justification. The continued supremacy of Great Britain over the Thirteen Colonies was necessary, “In order to preserve the UNITY of the British Empire.” By Price’s reckoning, any claims of this sort were so ridiculous as to be almost wholly contradictory. Such pleas, he declared,

In all ages, [have] been used to justify tyranny.–They have in RELIGION given rise to numberless oppressive claims, and slavish Hierarchies. And in the Romish Communion particularly, it is well known, that the POPE claims the titles and powers of supreme head on earth of the Christian church, in order to preserve its UNITY.–With respect to the British Empire, nothing can be more preposterous than to endeavor to maintain its unity by setting up such a method of establishing unity, which, like the similar method in religion, can produce nothing but mischief.

It likely bears noting here that Price’s use of the hierarchical nature of the Roman Catholic Church as an example of unity run amok was almost certainly due more to his status as a Non-Conformist Protestant than any particular deficiency on the part of the so-called “Romish Communion.” Granting that the centralizing tendencies of the Roman Church did play a role in the doctrinal disagreements at the heart of the Protestant Reformation – and that this may indeed be what Price was referring to – the various incidents of disunity historically experienced by that confession had more complex and varied origins than could be accounted for by the claimed authority of the Pope alone. For that matter, while the existence of a singular religious “executive” may not be its cause, the Roman Catholic Church has historically been among the most unified congregations among contemporary Christian denominations, and likewise the most resistant to permanent schism.

Whether this was true or not matters but little, however, so long as Price believed it to be the case. To his thinking – regardless of how he got there – excessive centralization, whether in matters of faith or administration, inevitably led to a kind of countervailing disunity. People were not sheep, after all, and could not heed even a well-intentioned shepherd’s directions indefinitely without at some point happening upon a cause for disagreement. The organizational framework that could not peacefully channel the resulting tensions – by fostering constructive debate or allowing for variations in local practice – was accordingly doomed to failure. Price’s ideal conception of unity within the British Empire, therefore, took the form of, “A common relation to one supreme executive head; an exchange of kind offices; types of interest and affection, and compacts [.]” Thus bound to one another by ties of sentiment and economic interest rather than sovereignty or statute, America and Britain might each pursue the policies that best suited their needs without either coming to resent the overbearing influence of the other. Disputes could thereby be adjudicated rather than allowed to devolve into violent confrontation, each side being secure in the notion that, come what may, they did not stand to lose their liberties depending on the position they chose to support. The alternative, of course, was what America and Britain had thus far witnessed: rigidity, confrontation, escalation, and war. If this was the price to be paid for unity, Price avowed – “If, in order to preserve it Unity, one half of [the empire] must be enslaved to the other half, let it, in the name of God, want Unity.” 

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

Pursuant to his evident aim of demonstrating the inherently illiberal nature of the contemporary British Empire, the author of Observations offered his own particularly incisive commentary upon a very common subject of study and discussion in the 17^th and 18^th century Anglo-American world. That subject, being the history, politics, and philosophy of the ancient Roman Republic, offered inspiration to traditionalists and radicals alike among the scholarly-minded inhabitants of the contemporary British Empire. From the ardent Tories who saw in Rome’s balance of domestic liberty and extraterritorial splendor a reflection of their native realm to the radical Whigs whose abhorrence of corruption and championing of virtue found validation in the orations of Cicero (106-43 BC) and Cato the Younger (95-46 BC) and was embodied in the social values of the Roman civilization, ancient Rome – at its best – represented a kind of cultural/political ideal with which Britons of all stripes increasingly identified as the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment brought forth a renewed interest in the literature and history of classical antiquity. Richard Price, while demonstrably fluent in the resulting socio-political vocabulary, was evidently among the minority of those who saw more to condemn than admire, however. Rome, he asserted near the end of Part I, Section III of Observations, was fundamentally founded and sustained upon a platform of conquest, whereby formerly independent peoples were made subjects of an empire in whose government they had no voice and under whose laws they enjoyed only limited rights. “The Roman Republic [,]” he thereby concluded, “Was nothing but a faction against the general liberties of the world; and had no more right to give law to the Provinces subject to it, than thieves have to the property they seize, or to the houses into which they break.”

The context for this declaration had to do with the supposed right of conquerors to impose their will upon their victims. Price’s identification of an argument to this end aimed at the American colonies with the example of ancient Rome would accordingly seem to indicate that he equated contemporary British attitudes towards the concept of empire as being to some extent in self-conscious emulation of the imagined glory – and virtue – of that selfsame ancient republic. Britons saw themselves, in short, as 18^th century Romans whose power and prestige was equaled only by the degree to which their government was built upon a foundation of integrity, justice, and discipline. Price, it seemed, disagreed on both counts. After first asserting, by way of comparison, that an empire in which a number of sovereign states are held together by a series of compacts, a common council, or a shared monarch is an “Empire of Freemen” while an empire in which every state is bound to an absolute monarch, “Whose will is their law [,]” is an “Empire of Slaves [,]” he went on to describe the ancient Roman – and, by extension, the contemporary British – polity as effectively combining the appearance of one with the function of the other. An empire, he accordingly declared, in which,

One of the states is free, but governs by its will all the other states; then is [that] Empire, like that of the Romans in the times of the republic, an Empire consisting of one state free, and the rest in slavery. Nor does it make more difference in this case, that the governing state is itself free, than it does in the case of a kingdom subject to a despot, that this despot is himself free.

Thus did Price attempt to disabuse his readers of the notion that the Britain they championed or the Rome they idolized were in either case anywhere near as free and virtuous as they preferred to believe.

Rome, even during the phase of its existence when it was governed as a republic, did justice mainly to those who lived in the city proper. Only these lucky few were in any practical way represented by the various tribal assembled, the Senate, and the magistrates, and could thus be fairly qualified as free. All other inhabitants of the extended – and extending – Roman world were mere subjects, sometimes called citizen but with no means of affirming it, more often called freeman possessed of hardly any rights at all. 18^th century Britain was effectively no different in its basic socio-political dynamics. Those among its inhabitants who lived in England, Scotland, or Wales truly were among the freest people in the contemporary world, being represented in Parliament as well as possessed of a number of fundamental civil rights. Those who lived in America, however, or India, or the Caribbean were nowhere near so fortunate. Even laying aside the millions of indigenous peoples whose legal rights within the British Empire were either exceedingly thin or non-existent, even the European settler populations in these regions were forced to function in a kind of legal gray zone in which their rights were formally acknowledged but they possessed no easily accessible means of asserting them. To be British in Jamaica, Bengal, or the Carolinas, in short, was certainly preferable by contemporary standards to being a native of any of these provinces, though it still would have paled in comparison to being British in London or Edinburgh. And yet, regrettable though authorities in Britain may well have admitted this situation was, they could no more honestly deny the degree to which they benefitted from the arrangement than their ancient Roman equivalents.

Price affirmed the veracity of this claim in the text of Observations by paraphrasing a passage of Montesquieu’s aforementioned Spirit of the Laws. “A great writer,” he asserted,

Observes of the Roman Empire, that while Liberty was at the center, tyranny prevailed in the distant provinces; that such as were free under it were extremely so, while those who were slaves groaned under the extremity of slavery; and that the same events that destroyed the liberty of the former, gave liberty to the latter.

In echoing these sentiments, Price plainly sought to draw the attention of his audience to the relationship between the center and the periphery that has so often sustained some of history’s most powerful empires. The extraordinary freedom enjoyed by the Roman citizen at the height of the republic thereof was unequivocally the product of that same entity’s persistent expansion into foreign territories and conquest of foreign states, tribes, and peoples. The grain subsidies, military pensions, abundance of trade goods, and splendid public amenities all owed their existence to the labor and the wealth of provinces wholly unable to assert their desires within the halls of power. Sometimes this one-sided transfer of resources came in the form of outright slavery, though as often it was facilitated by the much more seemly practice of taxation. In either case, however, the basic extant principle was that the provinces essentially belonged to Rome and that the government thereof could dispose of them as it wished.

            The same could arguably have been said of the 18^th century British Empire. The wealth that contemporary Britons enjoyed and the freedoms that they cherished were in no small part owed to the resources that were being yearly extracted from the far flung territories of their growing colonial empire. Access to Indian cotton, America tobacco, or Jamaican coffee kept prices for these commodities low in Britain, trade monopolies buttressed wages and promoted manufacturing, and the resulting economic growth and prosperity prevented successive governments from seeing any reason to tamp down on the civil liberties of a society that was generally fairly pleased with the way things were. There were, of course, any number of communities whose standards of living remained distressingly low – from coal miners, to textile workers, to the urban poor – but these groups were too disparate and often as not too invested in the status quo to represent anything like a threat to the reigning hierarchy. By the late 1770s, Great Britain had wholly ceased to be a feudal society in which a majority peasant population was only ever one bad harvest away from raising its pitchforks in riot and revolt. Economic diversification, spurred by access to raw materials and new markets, effectively ensured that the average citizen was prosperous enough to no longer represent a latent threat to the forces of social stability. Most of them were still being kept at arm’s length from active participation in public affairs by property restrictions on voting, but they could nonetheless safely enjoy a bevy of fairly substantial legal rights without in any undue way diminishing the powers of Parliament or the Crown.

Britain’s colonial periphery was absolutely instrumental to this state of affairs, both for the resources they provided and the degree to which their populations possessed no legal entitlement to administrative consultation. America, the Caribbean, and India supplied increasingly valuable raw materials for British merchants to resell at a profit, markets for goods manufactured in Britain, and even sources of tax revenue and billets for members of a sprawling military apparatus whose reduction was both politically and strategically undesirable. In spite of the immense value that these regions could accordingly be said to have contributed to the growth and prosperity of the empire as a whole, however, none of them enjoyed a consistent means of making themselves heard by and within its decision-making bodies. Granted, many of Britain’s American and Caribbean dependencies possessed representative governments of their own – with such regions of India as fell under British hegemony meanwhile being governed by the privately-owned East India Company – blessed with the power to levy taxes and formulate legislation as Parliament did for Britain proper. These colonial entities were not, therefore, quite as subservient in practice as the various provinces of republican Rome – all of which were administered by Senate-appointed governors – were to the government of that splendid city. That being said, Britain’s various 18^th century colonies shared with these provinces a fundamental legal inferiority to a central governing authority whose decisions were paramount and final and over which they possessed limited – if any – influence.

Accordingly, a sitting British government in the late 18^th century could decide to tax foreign molasses entering colonial ports in attempt to subsidize the product of its own Caribbean plantations – as occurred in 1733 – without any need to consult with the relevant populations. It could also attempt to limit the ability of colonial merchants to trade with the colonies of foreign powers – as happened numerous times between 1651 and 1696 – prevent the creation of complex ironworks or steel refineries in British America – as occurred in 1750 – or limit the ability of American colonial governments to issue paper currency for the payment of debts – as occurred in 1764 – all without being forced to wrangle with the potential public or popular displeasure of the affected communities. British troops could be deployed in Massachusetts, restrictions placed on imports to the Bahamas, and specific religions given official sanction in Quebec, each as the government and Parliament believed the results would benefit the empire over which it exercised unparalleled control. This state of affairs was exactly what Price observed of the Roman Republic, and which he attempted to call to the attention of all those who would idolize the same as a paragon of strength and liberty in equal measure. “The liberty of the Romans,” he thus asserted,

Was only an additional calamity to the provinces governed by them; and though it might have been said of the Citizens of Rome, that they were the “freest members of any civil society in the known world;” yet of the Subjects of Rome, it must be said, that they were the completest slaves in the known world.

This dichotomy was not coincidental. Rome was free and prosperous in proportion to the degree to which the provinces were not. Just so – as the examples cited above attest – Britain was free and prosperous in proportion to the degree to which its colonies were not.

Boosting the British economy and increasing the civil and economic freedoms of the British people meant necessarily curtailing these same liberties on the part of Britain’s colonial subjects. Cheap sugar in London, textile jobs in Lancashire, and respectable profits for merchants across the British Isles would simply have been impossible to achieve within the zero-sum thinking of mercantilist economics without successive governments being able to essentially force people in Pennsylvania to pay more for foreign sugar, require their neighbors in New York to buy only imported British textiles, and mandate that debtors across America pay off their obligations exclusively in expensive hard currency rather than depreciated paper bills. It was a decidedly one-sided relationship, and one which the British people had benefitted from for so long and so abundantly that by the end of the 18^th century they had come to take it almost entirely for granted. Price’s commentary upon this unthinking attitude was accordingly quite acute. “We have been so used to speaking of the Colonies as our Colonies,” he thus observed at the beginning of Part II of Observations, “And to think of them as in a state of subordination to us, and as holding their existence in America only for our use, that it is no wonder the prejudices of many are alarmed, when they find a different doctrine maintained.” A more cogent and succinct evaluation of contemporary mainstream British attitudes towards the American colonies entirely fails to come to mind.

It wasn’t that the British people sought to disenfranchise their American brethren out of a sense of malice, pique, or greed. They did not want to rob them of the liberties that they themselves held dear as punishment for some imagined crime. Nor even did they think of the inhabitants of America as being somehow fundamentally inferior to their British resident counterparts. The issue as hand was rather that they didn’t think about America or Americans at all, save to perhaps occasionally remind themselves of the glory and wealth that they represented for the empire. Even the lowliest of his fellow countrymen, Price accordingly observed, was given, “To look upon himself as having a body of subjects in America; and to be offended at the denial of his right to make laws for them, though perhaps he does not know what colour they are, or what language they talk.” This condition was both to some degree natural and capable of being remedied. The issue at hand was simply one of ignorance, and the best method for its alleviation that of education. Price thus determined to apply himself in the sections of Observations that followed to documenting, analyzing, and deconstructing some of the basic assumptions harbored by his fellow Britons as to the justice and necessity of making war on the Thirteen Colonies in order to retain their allegiance to the British Crown. In so doing, he hoped that, “More just sentiments [would] prevail” and the general happiness of the British Empire might fairly have been achieved.

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.