enthusiasts for the British Constitution, and preceded Burke in the
tendency to canonise it, and to magnify it as an ideal exemplar for
nations. John Adams said, in 1766: "Here lies the difference between
the British Constitution and other forms of government, namely, that
liberty is its end, its use, its designation, drift and scope, as much
as grinding corn is the use of a mill." Another celebrated Bostonian
identified the Constitution with the law of Nature, as Montesquieu
called the Civil Law, written Reason. He said: "It is the glory of the
British prince and the happiness of all his subjects, that their
constitution hath its foundation in the immutable laws of Nature; and
as the supreme legislative, as well as the supreme executive, derives
its authority from that constitution, it should seem that no laws can
be made or executed that are repugnant to any essential law in
Nature." The writer of these words, James Otis, is the founder of the
revolutionary doctrine. Describing one of his pamphlets, the second
President says: "Look over the declaration of rights and wrongs issued
by Congress in 1774; look into the declaration of independence in
1776; look into the writings of Dr. Price and Dr. Priestley; look into
all the French constitutions of government; and, to cap the climax,
look into Mr. Thomas Paine's _Common Sense_, _Crisis_, and _Rights of
Man_. What can you find that is not to be found in solid substance in
this 'Vindication of the House of Representatives'?" When these men
found that the appeal to the law and to the constitution did not avail
them, that the king, by bribing the people's representatives with the
people's money, was able to enforce his will, they sought a higher
tribunal, and turned from the law of England to the law of Nature, and
from the king of England to the King of kings. Otis, in 1762, 1764
and 1765, says: "Most governments are, in fact, arbitrary, and
consequently the curse and scandal of human nature; yet none are of
right arbitrary. By the laws of God and nature, government must not
raise taxes on the property of the people without the consent of the
people or their deputies. There can be no prescription old enough to
supersede the law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has
given all men a right to be free. If a man has but little property to
protect and defend, yet his life and liberty are things of some
importance." About the same time Gadsden wrote: "A confirmation of our
essential and common rights as Englishmen may be pleaded from charters
clearly enough; but any further dependence on them may be fatal. We
should stand upon the broad common ground of those natural rights that
we all feel and know as men and as descendants of Englishmen."
The primitive fathers of the United States began by preferring
abstract moral principle to the letter of the law and the spirit of
the Constitution. But they went farther. Not only was their grievance
difficult to substantiate at law, but it was trivial in extent. The
claim of England was not evidently disproved, and even if it was
unjust, the injustice practically was not hard to bear. The suffering
that would be caused by submission was immeasurably less than the
suffering that must follow resistance, and it was more uncertain and
remote. The utilitarian argument was loud in favour of obedience and
loyalty. But if interest was on one side, there was a manifest
principle on the other--a principle so sacred and so clear as
imperatively to demand the sacrifice of men's lives, of their families
and their fortune. They resolved to give up everything, not to escape
from actual oppression, but to honour a precept of unwritten law. That
was the transatlantic discovery in the theory of political duty, the
light that came over the ocean. It represented liberty not as a
comparative release from tyranny, but as a thing so divine that the
existence of society must be staked to prevent even the least
constructive infraction of its sovereign right. "A free people," said
Dickinson, "can never be too quick in observing nor too firm in
opposing the beginnings of alteration either in form or reality,
respecting institutions formed for their security. The first kind of
alteration leads to the last. As violations of the rights of the
governed are commonly not only specious, but small at the beginning,
they spread over the multitude in such a manner as to touch
individuals but slightly. Every free state should incessantly watch,
and instantly take alarm at any addition being made to the power
exercised over them." Who are a free people? Not those over whom
government is reasonably and equitably exercised; but those who live
under a government so constitutionally checked and controlled that
proper provision is made against its being otherwise exercised. The
contest was plainly a contest of principle, and was conducted entirely
on principle by both parties. "The amount of taxes proposed to be
raised," said Marshall, the greatest of constitutional lawyers, "was
too inconsiderable to interest the people of either country." I will
add the words of Daniel Webster, the great expounder of the
Constitution, who is the most eloquent of the Americans, and stands,
in politics, next to Burke: "The Parliament of Great Britain asserted
a right to tax the Colonies in all cases whatsoever; and it was
precisely on this question that they made the Revolution turn. The
amount of taxation was trifling, but the claim itself was inconsistent
with liberty, and that was in their eyes enough. It was against the
recital of an act of Parliament, rather than against any suffering
under its enactment, that they took up arms. They went to war against
a preamble. They fought seven years against a declaration. They saw in
the claim of the British Parliament a seminal principle of mischief,
the germ of unjust power."
The object of these men was liberty, not independence. Their feeling
was expressed by Jay in his address to the people of Great Britain:
"Permit us to be as free as yourselves, and we shall ever esteem a
union with you to be our greatest glory and our greatest happiness."
Before 1775 there was no question of separation. During all the
Revolution Adams declared that he would have given everything to
restore things as before with security; and both Jefferson and Madison
admitted in the presence of the English minister that a few seats in
both Houses would have set at rest the whole question.
In their appeal to the higher law the Americans professed the purest
Whiggism, and they claimed that their resistance to the House of
Commons and the jurisprudence of Westminster only carried forward the
eternal conflict between Whig and Tory. By their closer analysis, and
their fearlessness of logical consequences, they transformed the
doctrine and modified the party. The uprooted Whig, detached from his
parchments and precedents, his leading families and historic
conditions, exhibited new qualities; and the era of compromise made
way for an era of principle. Whilst French diplomacy traced the long
hand of the English opposition in the tea riots at Boston, Chatham and
Camden were feeling the influence of Dickinson and Otis, without
recognising the difference. It appears in a passage of one of
Chatham's speeches, in 1775: "This universal opposition to your
arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen. It was obvious
from the nature of things, and from the nature of man, and, above all,
from the confirmed habits of thinking, from the spirit of Whiggism
flourishing in America. The spirit which now pervades America is the
same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship-money in
this country, is the same spirit which roused all England to action at
the Revolution, and which established at a remote era your liberties,
on the basis of that grand fundamental maxim of the Constitution, that
no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent. To
maintain this principle is the common cause of the Whigs on the other
side of the Atlantic, and on this. It is the alliance of God and
Nature, immutable, eternal, fixed as the firmament of heaven.
Resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just; and your vain
declarations of the omnipotence of parliament, and your imperious
doctrines of the necessity of submission will be found equally
impotent to convince or enslave your fellow-subjects in America."
The most significant instance of the action of America on Europe is
Edmund Burke. We think of him as a man who, in early life, rejected
all generalities and abstract propositions, and who became the most
strenuous and violent of conservatives. But there is an interval when,
as the quarrel with the Colonies went on, Burke was as revolutionary
as Washington. The inconsistency is not as flagrant as it seems. He
had been brought forward by the party of measured propriety and
imperative moderation, of compromise and unfinished thought, who
claimed the right of taxing, but refused to employ it. When he urged
the differences in every situation and every problem, and shrank from
the common denominator and the underlying principle, he fell into step
with his friends. As an Irishman, who had married into an Irish
Catholic family, it was desirable that he should adopt no theories in
America which would unsettle Ireland. He had learnt to teach
government by party as an almost sacred dogma, and party forbids
revolt as a breach of the laws of the game. His scruples and his
protests, and his defiance of theory, were the policy and the
precaution of a man conscious of restraints, and not entirely free in
the exertion of powers that lifted him far above his tamer
surroundings. As the strife sharpened and the Americans made way,
Burke was carried along, and developed views which he never utterly
abandoned, but which are difficult to reconcile with much that he
wrote when the Revolution had spread to France.
In his address to the Colonists he says: "We do not know how to
qualify millions of our countrymen, contending with one heart for an
admission to privileges which we have ever thought our own happiness
and honour, by odious and unworthy names. On the contrary, we highly
revere the principles on which you act. We had much rather see you
totally independent of this crown and kingdom, than joined to it by so
unnatural a conjunction as that of freedom and servitude. We view the
establishment of the English Colonies on principles of liberty, as
that which is to render this kingdom venerable to future ages. In
comparison of this, we regard all the victories and conquests of our
warlike ancestors, or of our own times, as barbarous, vulgar
distinctions, in which many nations, whom we look upon with little
respect or value, have equalled, if not far exceeded us. Those who
have and who hold to that foundation of common liberty, whether on
this or on your side of the ocean, we consider as the true and the
only true Englishmen. Those who depart from it, whether there or here,
are attainted, corrupted in blood, and wholly fallen from their
original rank and value. They are the real rebels to the fair
constitution and just supremacy of England. A long course of war with
the administration of this country may be but a prelude to a series of
wars and contentions among yourselves, to end at length (as such
scenes have too often ended) in a species of humiliating repose, which
nothing but the preceding calamities would reconcile to the dispirited
few who survived them. We allow that even this evil is worth the risk
to men of honour when rational liberty is at stake, as in the present
case we confess and lament that it is."
At other times he spoke as follows:--"Nothing less than a convulsion
that will shake the globe to its centre can ever restore the European
nations to that liberty by which they were once so much distinguished.
The Western world was the seat of freedom until another, more Western,
was discovered; and that other will probably be its asylum when it is
hunted down in every other part. Happy it is that the worst of times
may have one refuge still left for humanity. If the Irish resisted
King William, they resisted him on the very same principle that the
English and Scotch resisted King James. The Irish Catholics must have
been the very worst and the most truly unnatural of rebels, if they
had not supported a prince whom they had seen attacked, not for any
designs against their religion or their liberties, but for an extreme
partiality for their sect. Princes otherwise meritorious have violated
the liberties of the people, and have been lawfully deposed for such
violation. I know no human being exempt from the law. I consider
Parliament as the proper judge of kings, and it is necessary that they
should be amenable to it. There is no such thing as governing the
whole body of the people contrary to their inclination. Whenever they
have a feeling they commonly are in the right. Christ appeared in
sympathy with the lowest of the people, and thereby made it a firm and
ruling principle that their welfare was the object of all government.
"In all forms of government the people is the true legislator. The
remote and efficient cause is the consent of the people, either actual
or implied, and such consent is absolutely essential to its validity.
Whiggism did not consist in the support of the power of Parliament or
of any other power, but of the rights of the people. If Parliament
should become an instrument in invading them, it was no better in any
respect, and much worse in some, than any other instrument of
arbitrary power. They who call upon you to belong wholly to the people
are those who wish you to belong to your proper home, to the sphere of
your duty, to the post of your honour. Let the Commons in Parliament
assembled be one and the same thing with the Commons at large. I see
no other way for the preservation of a decent attention to public
interest in the representatives, but the interposition of the body of
the people itself, whenever, it shall appear by some flagrant and
notorious act, by some capital innovation, that those representatives
are going to overleap the fences of the law and to introduce an
arbitrary power. This interposition is a most unpleasant remedy; but
if it be a legal remedy, it is intended on some occasion to be
used--to be used then only when it is evident that nothing else can
hold the Constitution to its true principles. It is not in Parliament
alone that the remedy for parliamentary disorders can be completed;
hardly, indeed, can it begin there. A popular origin cannot therefore
be the characteristic distinction of a popular representative. This
belongs equally to all parts of government, and in all forms. The
virtue, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons consists in its
being the express image of the feelings of the nation. It was not
instituted to be a control upon the people. It was designed as a
control for the people. Privilege of the crown and privilege of
Parliament are only privilege so long as they are exercised for the
benefit of the people. The voice of the people is a voice that is to
be heard, and not the votes and resolutions of the House of Commons.
He would preserve thoroughly every privilege of the people, because it
is a privilege known and written in the law of the land; and he would
support it, not against the crown or the aristocratic party only, but
against the representatives of the people themselves. This was not a
government of balances. It would be a strange thing if two hundred
peers should have it in their power to defeat by their negative what
had been done by the people of England. I have taken my part in
political connections and political quarrels for the purpose of
advancing justice and the dominion of reason, and I hope I shall never
prefer the means, or any feelings growing out of the use of those
means, to the great and substantial end itself. Legislators can do
what lawyers can not, for they have no other rules to bind them but
the great principles of reason and equity and the general sense of
mankind. All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they
may alter the mode and application, but have no power over the
substance, of original justice. A conservation and secure enjoyment of
our natural rights is the great and ultimate purpose of civil society.
"The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the
world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness
of another. I would give a full civil protection, in which I include
an immunity from all disturbance of their public religious worship,
and a power of teaching in schools as well as temples, to Jews,
Mahometans, and even Pagans. The Christian religion itself arose
without establishment, it arose even without toleration, and whilst
its own principles were not tolerated, it conquered all the powers of
darkness, it conquered all the powers of the world. The moment it
began to depart from these principles, it converted the establishment
into tyranny, it subverted its foundation from that very hour. It is
the power of government to prevent much evil; it can do very little
positive good in this, or perhaps in anything else. It is not only so
of the State and statesman, but of all the classes and descriptions of
the rich: they are the pensioners of the poor, and are maintained by
their superfluity. They are under an absolute, hereditary, and
indefeasible dependence on those who labour and are miscalled the
poor. That class of dependent pensioners called the rich is so
extremely small, that if all their throats were cut, and a
distribution made of all they consume in a year, it would not give a
bit of bread and cheese for one night's supper to those who labour,
and who in reality feed both the pensioners and themselves. It is not
in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature and
consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of
softening the divine displeasure. It is the law of nature, which is
the law of God."
I cannot resist the inference from these passages that Burke, after
1770, underwent other influences than those of his reputed masters,
the Whigs of 1688. And if we find that strain of unwonted thought in a
man who afterwards gilded the old order of things and wavered as to
toleration and the slave trade, we may expect that the same causes
would operate in France.
When the _Letters of a Pennsylvanian Farmer_ became known in Europe,
Diderot said that it was madness to allow Frenchmen to read such
things, as they could not do it without becoming intoxicated and
changed into different men. But France was impressed by the event more
than by the literature that accompanied it. America had made herself
independent under less provocation than had ever been a motive of
revolt, and the French Government had acknowledged that her cause was
righteous and had gone to war for it. If the king was right in
America, he was utterly wrong at home, and if the Americans acted
rightly, the argument was stronger, the cause was a hundredfold
better, in France itself. All that justified their independence
condemned the Government of their French allies. By the principle that
taxation without representation is robbery, there was no authority so
illegitimate as that of Lewis XVI. The force of that demonstration was
irresistible, and it produced its effect where the example of England
failed. The English doctrine was repelled at the very earliest stage
of the Revolution, and the American was adopted. What the French took
from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of
government--their cutting, not their sewing. Many French nobles served
in the war, and came home republicans and even democrats by
conviction. It was America that converted the aristocracy to the
reforming policy, and gave leaders to the Revolution. "The American
Revolution," says Washington, "or the peculiar light of the age, seems
to have opened the eyes of almost every nation in Europe, and a spirit
of equal liberty appears fast to be gaining ground everywhere." When
the French officers were leaving, Cooper, of Boston, addressed them in
the language of warning: "Do not let your hopes be inflamed by our
triumphs on this virgin soil. You will carry our sentiments with you,
but if you try to plant them in a country that has been corrupt for
centuries, you will encounter obstacles more formidable than ours. Our
liberty has been won with blood; you will have to shed it in torrents
before liberty can take root in the old world." Adams, after he had
been President of the United States, bitterly regretted the Revolution
which made them independent, because it had given the example to the
French; although he also believed that they had not a single principle
in common.
Nothing, on the contrary, is more certain than that American
principles profoundly influenced France, and determined the course of
the Revolution. It is from America that Lafayette derived the saying
that created a commotion at the time, that resistance is the most
sacred of duties. There also was the theory that political power comes
from those over whom it is exercised, and depends upon their will;
that every authority not so constituted is illegitimate and
precarious; that the past is more a warning than an example; that the
earth belongs to those who are upon it, not to those who are
underneath. These are characteristics common to both Revolutions.
At one time also the French adopted and acclaimed the American notion
that the end of government is liberty, not happiness, or prosperity,
or power, or the preservation of an historic inheritance, or the
adaptation of national law to national character, or the progress of
enlightenment and the promotion of virtue; that the private individual
should not feel the pressure of public authority, and should direct
his life by the influences that are within him, not around him.
And there was another political doctrine which the Americans
transmitted to the French. In old colonial days the executive and the
judicial powers were derived from a foreign source, and the common
purpose was to diminish them. The assemblies were popular in origin
and character, and everything that added to their power seemed to add
security to rights. James Wilson, one of the authors and commentators
of the constitution, informs us that "at the Revolution the same fond
predilection, and the same jealous dislike, existed and prevailed. The
executive, and the judicial as well as the legislative authority, was
now the child of the people, but to the two former the people behaved
like stepmothers. The legislature was still discriminated by excessive
partiality." This preference, historic but irrational, led up
naturally to a single chamber. The people of America and their
delegates in Congress were of opinion that a single Assembly was every
way adequate to the management of their federal concerns, and when the
Senate was invented, Franklin strongly objected. "As to the two
chambers," he wrote, "I am of your opinion that one alone would be
better; but, my dear friend, nothing in human affairs and schemes is
perfect, and perhaps this is the case of our opinions."
Alexander Hamilton was the ablest as well as the most conservative of
the American statesmen. He longed for monarchy, and he desired to
establish a national government and to annihilate state rights. The
American spirit, as it penetrated France, cannot well be described
better than it was by him: "I consider civil liberty, in a genuine,
unadulterated sense, as the greatest of terrestrial blessings. I am
convinced that the whole human race is entitled to it, and that it can
be wrested from no part of them without the blackest and most
aggravated guilt. The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged
for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a
sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the
Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."
But when we speak in the gross of the American Revolution we combine
different and discordant things. From the first agitation in 1761 to
the Declaration of Independence, and then to the end of the war in
1782, the Americans were aggressive, violent in their language, fond
of abstractions, prolific of doctrines universally applicable and
universally destructive. It is the ideas of those earlier days that
roused the attention of France, and were imported by Lafayette,
Noailles, Lameth, and the leaders of the future revolution who had
beheld the lowering of the British flag at Yorktown. The America of
their experience was the America of James Otis, of Jefferson, of _The
Rights of Man_.