the object is the number of people in the colonies. I have taken for
some years a good deal of pains on that point. I can by no calculation
justify myself in placing the number below two millions of inhabitants
of our own European blood and color,--besides at least 500,000 others,
who form no inconsiderable part of the strength and opulence of the
whole. This, Sir, is, I believe, about the true number. There is no
occasion to exaggerate, where plain truth is of so much weight and
importance. But whether I put the present numbers too high or too low is
a matter of little moment. Such is the strength with which population
shoots in that part of the world, that, state the numbers as high as we
will, whilst the dispute continues, the exaggeration ends. Whilst we are
discussing any given magnitude, they are grown to it. Whilst we spend
our time in deliberating on the mode of governing two millions, we shall
find we have millions more to manage. Your children do not grow faster
from infancy to manhood than they spread from families to communities,
and from villages to nations.
I put this consideration of the present and the growing numbers in the
front of our deliberation, because, Sir, this consideration will make it
evident to a blunter discernment than yours, that no partial, narrow,
contracted, pinched, occasional system will be at all suitable to such
an object. It will show you that it is not to be considered as one of
those _minima_ which are out of the eye and consideration of the
law,--not a paltry excrescence of the state,--not a mean dependant, who
may be neglected with little damage and provoked with little danger. It
will prove that some degree of care and caution is required in the
handling such an object; it will show that you ought not, in reason, to
trifle with so large a mass of the interests and feelings of the human
race. You could at no time do so without guilt; and be assured you will
not be able to do it long with impunity.
But the population of this country, the great and growing population,
though a very important consideration, will lose much of its weight, if
not combined with other circumstances. The commerce of your colonies is
out of all proportion beyond the numbers of the people. This ground of
their commerce, indeed, has been trod some days ago, and with great
ability, by a distinguished person,[21] at your bar. This gentleman,
after thirty-five years,--it is so long since he first appeared at the
same place to plead for the commerce of Great Britain,--has come again
before you to plead the same cause, without any other effect of time
than that to the fire of imagination and extent of erudition, which even
then marked him as one of the first literary characters of his age, he
has added a consummate knowledge in the commercial interest of his
country, formed by a long course of enlightened and discriminating
experience.
Sir, I should be inexcusable in coming after such a person with any
detail, if a great part of the members who now fill the House had not
the misfortune to be absent when he appeared at your bar. Besides, Sir,
I propose to take the matter at periods of time somewhat different from
his. There is, if I mistake not, a point of view from whence, if you
will look at this subject, it is impossible that it should not make an
impression upon you.
I have in my hand two accounts: one a comparative state of the export
trade of England to its colonies, as it stood in the year 1704, and as
it stood in the year 1772; the other a state of the export trade of this
country to its colonies alone, as it stood in 1772, compared with the
whole trade of England to all parts of the world (the colonies included)
in the year 1704. They are from good vouchers: the latter period from
the accounts on your table; the earlier from an original manuscript of
Davenant, who first established the Inspector-General's office, which
has been ever since his time so abundant a source of Parliamentary
information.
The export trade to the colonies consists of three great branches: the
African, which, terminating almost wholly in the colonies, must be put
to the account of their commerce; the West Indian; and the North
American. All these are so interwoven, that the attempt to separate them
would tear to pieces the contexture of the whole, and, if not entirely
destroy, would very much depreciate, the value of all the parts. I
therefore consider these three denominations to be, what in effect they
are, one trade.
The trade to the colonies, taken on the export side, at the beginning of
this century, that is, in the year 1704, stood thus:--
Exports to North America and the West
Indies £ 483,265
To Africa 86,665
---------
£ 569,930
In the year 1772, which I take as a middle year between the highest and
lowest of those lately laid on your table, the account was as follows:--
To North America and the West Indies £ 4,791,734
To Africa 866,398
To which if you add the export trade
from Scotland, which had in 1704 no
existence 364,000
----------
£6,024,171
From five hundred and odd thousand, it has grown to six millions. It has
increased no less than twelve-fold. This is the state of the colony
trade, as compared with itself at these two periods, within this
century;--and this is matter for meditation. But this is not all.
Examine my second account. See how the export trade to the colonies
alone in 1772 stood in the other point of view, that is, as compared to
the whole trade of England in 1704.
The whole export trade of England, including
that to the colonies, in 1704 £6,509,000
Export to the colonies alone, in 1772 6,024,000
---------
Difference £485,000
The trade with America alone is now within less than 500,000_l._ of
being equal to what this great commercial nation, England, carried on at
the beginning of this century with the whole world! If I had taken the
largest year of those on your table, it would rather have exceeded. But,
it will be said, is not this American trade an unnatural protuberance,
that has drawn the juices from the rest of the body? The reverse. It is
the very food that has nourished every other part into its present
magnitude. Our general trade has been greatly augmented, and augmented
more or less in almost every part to which it ever extended, but with
this material difference: that of the six millions which in the
beginning of the century constituted the whole mass of our export
commerce the colony trade was but one twelfth part; it is now (as a part
of sixteen millions) considerably more than a third of the whole. This
is the relative proportion of the importance of the colonies at these
two periods: and all reasoning concerning our mode of treating them must
have this proportion as its basis, or it is a reasoning weak, rotten,
and sophistical.
Mr. Speaker, I cannot prevail on myself to hurry over this great
consideration. It is good for us to be here. We stand where we have an
immense view of what is, and what is past. Clouds indeed, and darkness,
rest upon the future. Let us, however, before we descend from this noble
eminence, reflect that this growth of our national prosperity has
happened within the short period of the life of man. It has happened
within sixty-eight years. There are those alive whose memory might touch
the two extremities. For instance, my Lord Bathurst might remember all
the stages of the progress. He was in 1704 of an age at least to be made
to comprehend such things. He was then old enough _acta parentum jam
legere, et quæ sit poterit cognoscere virtus_. Suppose, Sir, that the
angel of this auspicious youth, foreseeing the many virtues which made
him one of the most amiable, as he is one of the most fortunate men of
his age, had opened to him in vision, that, when, in the fourth
generation, the third prince of the House of Brunswick had sat twelve
years on the throne of that nation which (by the happy issue of moderate
and healing councils) was to be made Great Britain, he should see his
son, Lord Chancellor of England, turn back the current of hereditary
dignity to its fountain, and raise him to an higher rank of peerage,
whilst he enriched the family with a new one,--if, amidst these bright
and happy scenes of domestic honor and prosperity, that angel should
have drawn up the curtain, and unfolded the rising glories of his
country, and whilst he was gazing with admiration on the then commercial
grandeur of England, the genius should point out to him a little speck,
scarce visible in the mass of the national interest, a small seminal
principle rather than a formed body, and should tell him,--"Young man,
there is America,--which at this day serves for little more than to
amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners, yet shall,
before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that
commerce which now attracts the envy of the world. Whatever England has
been growing to by a progressive increase of improvement, brought in by
varieties of people, by succession of civilizing conquests and
civilizing settlements in a series of seventeen hundred years, you shall
see as much added to her by America in the course of a single life!" If
this state of his country had been foretold to him, would it not require
all the sanguine credulity of youth, and all the fervid glow of
enthusiasm, to make him believe it? Fortunate man, he has lived to see
it! Fortunate indeed, if he lives to see nothing that shall vary the
prospect, and cloud the setting of his day!
Excuse me, Sir, if, turning from such thoughts, I resume this
comparative view once more. You have seen it on a large scale; look at
it on a small one. I will point out to your attention a particular
instance of it in the single province of Pennsylvania. In the year 1704,
that province called for 11,459_l._ in value of your commodities,
native and foreign. This was the whole. What did it demand in 1772! Why,
nearly fifty times as much; for in that year the export to Pennsylvania
was 507,909_l._, nearly equal to the export to all the colonies
together in the first period.
I choose, Sir, to enter into these minute and particular details;
because generalities, which in all other cases are apt to heighten and
raise the subject, have here a tendency to sink it. When we speak of the
commerce with our colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is
unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.
So far, Sir, as to the importance of the object in the view of its
commerce, as concerned in the exports from England. If I were to detail
the imports, I could show how many enjoyments they procure which deceive
the burden of life, how many materials which invigorate the springs of
national industry and extend and animate every part of our foreign and
domestic commerce. This would be a curious subject indeed,--but I must
prescribe bounds to myself in a matter so vast and various.
I pass, therefore, to the colonies in another point of view,--their
agriculture. This they have prosecuted with such a spirit, that, besides
feeding plentifully their own growing multitude, their annual export of
grain, comprehending rice, has some years ago exceeded a million in
value. Of their last harvest, I am persuaded, they will export much
more. At the beginning of the century some of these colonies imported
corn from the mother country. For some time past the Old World has been
fed from the New. The scarcity which you have felt would have been a
desolating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true filial
piety, with a Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youthful
exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent.
As to the wealth which the colonies have drawn from the sea by their
fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely
thought those acquisitions of value, for they seemed even to excite your
envy; and yet the spirit by which that enterprising employment has been
exercised ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and
admiration. And pray, Sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass by
the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New
England have of late carried on the whale-fishery. Whilst we follow them
among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into
the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, whilst
we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they
have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at
the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the South.
Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the
grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the
progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more
discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We
know, that, whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on
the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic
game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their
fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the
perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous
and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous
mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this
recent people,--a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle,
and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood. When I contemplate these
things,--when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing
to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form
by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but that,
through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been
suffered to take her own way to perfection,--when I reflect upon these
effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the
pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human
contrivances melt and die away within me,--my rigor relents,--I pardon
something to the spirit of liberty.
I am sensible, Sir, that all which I have asserted in my detail is
admitted in the gross, but that quite a different conclusion is drawn
from it. America, gentlemen say, is a noble object,--it is an object
well worth fighting for. Certainly it is, if fighting a people be the
best way of gaining them. Gentlemen in this respect will be led to their
choice of means by their complexions and their habits. Those who
understand the military art will of course have some predilection for
it. Those who wield the thunder of the state may have more confidence in
the efficacy of arms. But I confess, possibly for want of this
knowledge, my opinion is much more in favor of prudent management than
of force,--considering force not as an odious, but a feeble instrument,
for preserving a people so numerous, so active, so growing, so spirited
as this, in a profitable and subordinate connection with us.
First, Sir, permit me to observe, that the use of force alone is but
_temporary_. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the
necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed which is
perpetually to be conquered.
My next objection is its _uncertainty_. Terror is not always the effect
of force, and an armament is not a victory. If you do not succeed, you
are without resource: for, conciliation failing, force remains; but,
force failing, no further hope of reconciliation is left. Power and
authority are sometimes bought by kindness; but they can never be begged
as alms by an impoverished and defeated violence.
A further objection to force is, that you _impair the object_ by your
very endeavors to preserve it. The thing you fought for is not the thing
which you recover, but depreciated, sunk, wasted, and consumed in the
contest. Nothing less will content me than _whole America_. I do not
choose to consume its strength along with our own; because in all parts
it is the British strength that I consume. I do not choose to be caught
by a foreign enemy at the end of this exhausting conflict, and still
less in the midst of it. I may escape, but I can make no insurance
against such an event. Let me add, that I do not choose wholly to break
the American spirit; because it is the spirit that has made the country.
Lastly, we have no sort of _experience_ in favor of force as an
instrument in the rule of our colonies. Their growth and their utility
has been owing to methods altogether different. Our ancient indulgence
has been said to be pursued to a fault. It may be so; but we know, if
feeling is evidence, that our fault was more tolerable than our attempt
to mend it, and our sin far more salutary than our penitence.
These, Sir, are my reasons for not entertaining that high opinion of
untried force by which many gentlemen, for whose sentiments in other
particulars I have great respect, seem to be so greatly captivated. But
there is still behind a third consideration concerning this object,
which serves to determine my opinion on the sort of policy which ought
to be pursued in the management of America, even more than its
population and its commerce: I mean its _temper and character_.
In this character of the Americans a love of freedom is the
predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an
ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious,
restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest
from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the
only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is
stronger in the English colonies, probably, than in any other people of
the earth, and this from a great variety of powerful causes; which, to
understand the true temper of their minds, and the direction which this
spirit takes, it will not be amiss to lay open somewhat more largely.
First, the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen.
England, Sir, is a nation which still, I hope, respects, and formerly
adored, her freedom. The colonists emigrated from you when this part of
your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and
direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are therefore not
only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and
on English principles. Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions,
is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every
nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by way of
eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness. It happened, you
know, Sir, that the great contests for freedom in this country were from
the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing. Most of the
contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of
election of magistrates, or on the balance among the several orders of
the state. The question of money was not with them so immediate. But in
England it was otherwise. On this point of taxes the ablest pens and
most eloquent tongues have been exercised, the greatest spirits have
acted and suffered. In order to give the fullest satisfaction concerning
the importance of this point, it was not only necessary for those who in
argument defended the excellence of the English Constitution to insist
on this privilege of granting money as a dry point of fact, and to prove
that the right had been acknowledged in ancient parchments and blind
usages to reside in a certain body called an House of Commons: they went
much further: they attempted to prove, and they succeeded, that in
theory it ought to be so, from the particular nature of a House of
Commons, as an immediate representative of the people, whether the old
records had delivered this oracle or not. They took infinite pains to
inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people
must in effect themselves, mediately or immediately, possess the power
of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty could subsist. The
colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, these ideas and
principles. Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and attached on
this specific point of taxing. Liberty might be safe or might be
endangered in twenty other particulars without their being much pleased
or alarmed. Here they felt its pulse; and as they found that beat, they
thought themselves sick or sound. I do not say whether they were right
or wrong in applying your general arguments to their own case. It is not
easy, indeed, to make a monopoly of theorems and corollaries. The fact
is, that they did thus apply those general arguments; and your mode of
governing them, whether through lenity or indolence, through wisdom or
mistake, confirmed them in the imagination, that they, as well as you,
had an interest in these common principles.
They were further confirmed in this pleasing error by the form of their
provincial legislative assemblies. Their governments are popular in an
high degree: some are merely popular; in all, the popular representative
is the most weighty; and this share of the people in their ordinary
government never fails to inspire them with lofty sentiments, and with a
strong aversion from whatever tends to deprive them of their chief
importance.
If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of
government, religion would have given it a complete effect. Religion,
always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or
impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this
free spirit. The people are Protestants, and of that kind which is the
most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a
persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it. I do not
think, Sir, that the reason of this averseness in the dissenting
churches from all that looks like absolute government is so much to be
sought in their religious tenets as in their history. Every one knows
that the Roman Catholic religion is at least coeval with most of the
governments where it prevails, that it has generally gone hand in hand
with them, and received great favor and every kind of support from
authority. The Church of England, too, was formed from her cradle under
the nursing care of regular government. But the dissenting interests
have sprung up in direct opposition to all the ordinary powers of the
world, and could justify that opposition only on a strong claim to
natural liberty. Their very existence depended on the powerful and
unremitted assertion of that claim. All Protestantism, even the most
cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent
in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance:
it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant
religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in
nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in
most of the northern provinces, where the Church of England,
notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of
private sect, not composing, most probably, the tenth of the people. The
colonists left England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrants
was the highest of all; and even that stream of foreigners which has
been constantly flowing into these colonies has, for the greatest part,
been composed of dissenters from the establishments of their several
countries, and have brought with them a temper and character far from
alien to that of the people with whom they mixed.
Sir, I can perceive, by their manner, that some gentlemen object to the
latitude of this description, because in the southern colonies the
Church of England forms a large body, and has a regular establishment.
It is certainly true. There is, however, a circumstance attending these
colonies, which, in my opinion, fully counterbalances this difference,
and makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than in
those to the northward. It is, that in Virginia and the Carolinas they
have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of
the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of
their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of
rank and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries
where it is a common blessing, and as broad and general as the air, may
be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the
exterior of servitude, liberty looks, amongst them, like something that
is more noble and liberal. I do not mean, Sir, to commend the superior
morality of this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue
in it; but I cannot alter the nature of man. The fact is so; and these
people of the southern colonies are much more strongly, and with an
higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty, than those to the
northward. Such were all the ancient commonwealths; such were our Gothic
ancestors; such in our days were the Poles; and such will be all masters
of slaves, who are not slaves themselves. In such a people, the
haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies
it, and renders it invincible.