THE RATIONAL and humanitarian enlightenment of the eighteenth century
did much for the welfare of mankind, but little to promote the
securities of freedom. Power was better employed than formerly, but
it did not abdicate.
In England, politically, the most advanced country, the impetus which
the Revolution gave to progress was exhausted, and people began to
say, now that the Jacobite peril was over, that no issue remained
between parties which made it worth while for men to cut each others'
throats. The development of the Whig philosophy was checked by the
practical tendency to compromise. Compromise distinguished the Whig
from the Roundhead, the man who succeeded from the man who failed, the
man who was the teacher of politics to the civilised world from the
man who left his head on Temple Bar.
The Seven Years' War renewed the interrupted march by involving
America in the concerns of Europe, and causing the colonies to react
on the parent state. That was a consequence which followed the
Conquest of Canada and the accession of George III. The two events,
occurring in quick succession, raised the American question. A
traveller who visited America some years earlier reports that there
was much discontent, and that separation was expected before very
long. That discontent was inoperative whilst a great military power
held Canada. Two considerations reconciled the colonists to the
disadvantages attending the connection with England. The English
fleet guarded the sea against pirates; the English army guarded the
land against the French. The former was desirable; the latter was
essential to their existence. When the danger on the French side
disappeared, it might become very uncertain whether the patrol of the
Atlantic was worth the price that America had to pay for it.
Therefore Montcalm foretold that the English, if they conquered the
French colonies, would lose their own. Many Frenchmen saw this, with
satisfaction; and the probability was so manifest that Englishmen saw
it too. It was their interest to strengthen their position with new
securities, in the place of that one supreme security which they had
lost by their victory at Quebec. That victory, with the vast
acquisition of territory that followed, would be no increase of
imperial power if it loosened the hold on Atlantic colonies.
Therefore, the policy of the hour was to enforce the existing claims
and to obtain unequivocal recognition of English sovereignty. The
most profitable method of doing it was in the shape of heavier
taxation; but taxes were a small matter in comparison with the
establishment of undisputed authority and unquestioning submission.
The tax might be nominal, if the principle was safe. Ways and means
would not be wanting in an empire which extended from Hudson's Bay to
the Gulf of Mexico. For the moment the need was not money but
allegiance. The problem was new, for the age of expansion had come
suddenly, in East and West, by the action of Pitt; and Pitt was no
longer in office, to find the solution.
Among the Whigs, who were a failing and discredited party, there were
men who already knew the policy by which since then the empire has
been reared--Adam Smith, Dean Tucker, Edmund Burke. But the great mass
went with the times, and held that the object of politics is power,
and that the more dominion is extended, the more it must be retained
by force. The reason why free trade is better than dominion was a
secret obscurely buried in the breast of economists.
Whilst the expulsion of the French from their Transatlantic empire
governed the situation, the immediate difficulty was brought on by the
new reign. The right of searching houses and ships for contraband was
conveyed by certain warrants called Writs of Assistance, which
required no specified designation, no oath or evidence, and enabled
the surprise visit to be paid by day or night. They were introduced
under Charles II, and had to be renewed within six months of the
demise of the crown. The last renewal had been at the death of George
II; and it was now intended that they should be efficacious, and
should protect the revenue from smugglers. Between 1727 and 1761 many
things had changed, and the colonies had grown to be richer, more
confident, more self-respecting. They claimed to extend to the
Mississippi, and had no French or Spaniards on their borders.
Practically, there was no neighbour but England, and they had a
patrimony such as no Englishman had dreamt of. The letter of the law,
the practice of the last generation, were no argument with the heirs
of unbounded wealth and power, and did not convince them that they
ought to lose by the aid which they had given against France. The
American jurists argued that this was good by English law, but could
not justly be applied to America, where the same constitutional
safeguards did not exist--where the cases would be tried by judges
without a jury, by judges who could be dismissed at pleasure, by
judges who were paid by fees which increased with the amount of the
property confiscated, and were interested in deciding against the
American importer, and in favour of the revenue. That was a technical
and pedestrian argument which every lawyer could understand, without
passing the limits of accustomed thought.
Then James Otis spoke, and lifted the question to a different level,
in one of the memorable speeches in political history. Assuming, but
not admitting, that the Boston custom-house officers were acting
legally, and within the statute, then, he said, the statute was wrong.
Their action might be authorised by parliament; but if so, parliament
had exceeded its authority, like Charles with his shipmoney, and James
with the dispensing power. There are principles which override
precedents. The laws of England may be a very good thing, but there
is such a thing as a higher law.
The court decided in favour of the validity of the writs; and John
Adams, who heard the judgment, wrote long after that in that hour the
child Independence was born. The English view triumphed for the time,
and the governor wrote home that the murmurs soon ceased. The States,
and ultimately the United States, rejected general warrants; and since
1817 they are in agreement with the law of England. On that point,
therefore, the colonies were in the right.
Then came the larger question of taxation. Regulation of external
traffic was admitted. England patrolled the sea and protected America
from the smuggler and the pirate. Some remuneration might be
reasonably claimed; but it ought to be obtained in such a way as not
to hamper and prohibit the increase of wealth. The restrictions on
industry and trade were, however, contrived for the benefit of England
and to the injury of her colonies. They demanded that the arrangement
should be made for their mutual advantage. They did not go so far as
to affirm that it ought to be to their advantage only, irrespective of
ours, which is our policy with our colonies at the present time. The
claim was not originally excessive. It is the basis of the imputation
that the dispute, on both sides, was an affair of sordid interest. We
shall find it more just to say that the motive was empire on one side
and self-government on the other. It was a question between liberty
and authority, government by consent and government by force, the
control of the subject by the State, and the control of the State by
the subject. The issue had never been so definitely raised. In
England it had long been settled. It had been settled that the
legislature could, without breach of any ethical or constitutional
law, without forfeiting its authority or exposing itself to just
revolt, make laws injurious to the subject for the benefit of English
religion or English trade. If that principle was abandoned in America
it could not well be maintained in Ireland, and the green flag might
fly on Dublin Castle.
This was no survival of the dark ages. Both the oppression of Ireland
and the oppression of America were the work of the modern school, of
men who executed one king and expelled another. It was the work of
parliament, of the parliaments of Cromwell and of William III. And
the parliament would not consent to renounce its own specific policy,
its right of imposing taxes. The crown, the clergy, the aristocracy,
were hostile to the Americans; but the real enemy was the House of
Commons. The old European securities for good government were found
insufficient protection against parliamentary oppression. The nation
itself, acting by its representatives, had to be subjected to control.
The political problem raised by the New World was more complicated
than the simple issues dealt with hitherto in the Old. It had become
necessary to turn back the current of the development of politics, to
bind and limit and confine the State, which it was the pride of the
moderns to exalt. It was a new phase of political history. The
American Revolution innovated upon the English Revolution, as the
English Revolution innovated on the politics of Bacon or of Hobbes.
There was no tyranny to be resented. The colonists were in many ways
more completely their own masters than Englishmen at home. They were
not roused by the sense of intolerable wrong. The point at issue was
a very subtle and refined one, and it required a great deal of
mismanagement to make the quarrel irreconcilable.
Successive English governments shifted their ground. They tried the
Stamp Act; then the duty on tea and several other articles; then the
tea duty alone; and at last something even less than the tea duty. In
one thing they were consistent: they never abandoned the right of
raising taxes. When the colonists, instigated by Patrick Henry,
resisted the use of stamps, and Pitt rejoiced that they had resisted,
parliament gave way on that particular measure, declaring that it
retained the disputed right. Townshend carried a series of taxes on
imports, which produced about three hundred pounds, and were dropped
by Lord North. Then an ingenious plan was devised, which would
enforce the right of taxation, but which would not be felt by American
pockets, and would, indeed, put money into them, in the shape of a
bribe. East Indiamen were allowed to carry tea to American ports
without paying toll in England. The Navigation Laws were suspended,
that people in New England might drink cheap tea, without smuggling.
The duty in England was a shilling a pound. The duty in America was
threepence a pound. The shilling was remitted, so that the colonies
had only a duty of threepence to pay instead of a duty of
fifteen-pence. The tea-drinker at Boston got his tea cheaper than the
tea-drinker at Bristol. The revenue made a sacrifice, it incurred a
loss, in order to gratify the discontented colonials. If it was a
grievance to pay more for a commodity, how could it be a grievance to
pay less for the same commodity? To gild the pill still further, it
was proposed that the threepence should be levied at the British
ports, so that the Americans should perceive nothing but the gift,
nothing but the welcome fact that their tea was cheaper, and should be
spared entirely the taste of the bitterness within. That would have
upset the entire scheme. The government would not hear of it.
America was to have cheap tea, but was to admit the tax. The sordid
purpose was surrendered on our side, and only the constitutional
motive was retained, in the belief that the sordid element alone
prevailed in the colonies.
That threepence broke up the British empire. Twelve years of renewed
contention, ever coming up in altered shape under different ministers,
made it clear that the mind of the great parent State was made up, and
that all variations of party were illusory. The Americans grew more
and more obstinate as they purged the sordid question of interest with
which they had begun. At first they had consented to the restrictions
imposed under the Navigation Laws. They now rejected them. One of
the tea ships in Boston harbour was boarded at night, and the tea
chests were flung into the Atlantic. That was the mild beginning of
the greatest Revolution that had ever broken out among civilised men.
The dispute had been reduced to its simplest expression, and had
become a mere question of principle. The argument from the Charters,
the argument from the Constitution, was discarded. The case was
fought out on the ground of the Law of Nature, more properly speaking,
of Divine Right. On that evening of 16th December, 1773, it became,
for the first time, the reigning force in History. By the rules of
right, which had been obeyed till then, England had the better cause.
By the principle which was then inaugurated, England was in the wrong,
and the future belonged to the colonies.
The revolutionary spirit had been handed down from the
seventeenth-century sects, through the colonial charters. As early as
1638 a Connecticut preacher said: "The choice of public magistrates
belongs unto the people, by God's own allowance. They who have the
power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power, also,
to set the bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which
they call them." In Rhode Island, where the Royal Charter was so
liberal that it lasted until 1842, all power reverted annually to the
people, and the authorities had to undergo re-election. Connecticut
possessed so finished a system of self-government in the towns, that
it served as a model for the federal Constitution. The Quakers of
Pennsylvania managed their affairs without privilege, or intolerance,
or slavery, or oppression. It was not to imitate England that they
went into the desert. Several colonies were in various ways far
ahead of the mother country; and the most advanced statesman of the
Commonwealth, Vane, had his training in New England.
After the outrage on board the Dartmouth in Boston harbour the
government resolved to coerce Massachusetts, and a continental
Congress met to devise means for its protection. The king's troops
were sent to destroy military stores that had been collected at
Concord; and at Lexington, on the outward march, as well as all the
way back, they were assailed by militia. The affair at Lexington,
19th April, 1775, was the beginning of the War of Independence, which
opened with the siege of Boston. Two months later the first action
was fought at Bried's Hill, or Bunker Hill, which are low heights
overlooking the town, and the colonials were repulsed with very little
loss.
The war that followed, and lasted six years, is not illustrious in
military annals, and interests us chiefly by the result. After the
first battle the colonies declared themselves independent. Virginia,
acting for herself only, led the way. Then the great revolutionist,
who was the Virginian leader, Jefferson, drew up the Declaration of
Independence, which was adopted by the remaining states. It was too
rhetorical to be scientific; but it recited the series of ideas which
the controversy had carried to the front.
Thirty thousand German soldiers, most of them from Hesse Cassel, were
sent out, and were at first partially successful; for they were
supported by the fleet, which the estuaries carried far inland. Where
the European army had not that advantage things went badly. The
Americans attacked Canada, expecting to be welcomed by the French
inhabitants who had been so recently turned into British subjects.
The attack failed dramatically by the death of General Montgomery,
under the walls of Quebec, and the French colonists remained loyal.
But an expedition sent from Canada against New York, under Burgoyne,
miscarried. Burgoyne had scarcely reached the Hudson when he was
forced to surrender at Saratoga. The Congress of the States, which
feebly directed operations, wished that the terms of surrender should
not be observed, and that the 5000 English and German prisoners,
instead of being sent home, should be detained until they could be
exchanged. Washington and his officers made known that if this was
done they would resign.
The British defeat at Saratoga is the event which determined the issue
of the conflict. It put an end to the vacillation of France. The
French government had to recover the position it had lost in the last
war, and watched the course of events for evidence that American
resistance was not about to collapse. At the end of 1777 the victory
of Saratoga supplied the requisite proof. Volunteers had been allowed
to go over, and much war material was furnished through the agency of
a comic poet. Now a treaty of alliance was concluded, a small army
was sent to sea, and in March 1778 England was informed that France
was at war with her. France was followed by Spain, afterwards by
Holland.
It was evident from the first that the combination was more than
England could hope to meet. Lord North at once gave way. He offered
to satisfy the American demands, and he asked that Chatham should take
office. From the moment that his old enemy, France, appeared on the
scene, Chatham was passionately warlike. The king agreed that he
should be asked to join the ministry, but refused to see him. America
declined the English overtures, in fulfilment of her treaty with
France. The negotiation with Chatham became impossible. That was no
misfortune, for he died a few weeks later, denouncing the government
and the opposition.
Then came that phase of war during which the navy of France, under
d'Orvilliers in the Channel, under Suffren in the east, under
d'Estaing and de Grasse in the west, proved itself equal to the navy
of England. It was by the fleet, not by the land forces, that
American independence was gained. But it was by the army officers
that American ideas, sufficient to subvert every European state, were
transplanted into France. When de Grasse drove the English fleet away
from Virginian waters, Cornwallis surrendered the army of the south at
Yorktown, as Burgoyne had surrendered with the northern army at
Saratoga.
The Whigs came in and recognised the independence of the colonies, as
North would have done four years earlier, when France intervened.
Terms of peace with European Powers were made more favourable by the
final success of Rodney at Dominica and of Elliot at Gibraltar; but
the warlike repute of England fell lower than at any time since the
Revolution.
The Americans proceeded to give themselves a Constitution which should
hold them together more effectively than the Congress which carried
them through the war, and they held a Convention for the purpose at
Philadelphia during the summer of 1787. The difficulty was to find
terms of union between the three great states--Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts--and the smaller ones, which included New York. The great
states would not allow equal power to the others; the small ones would
not allow themselves to be swamped by mere numbers. Therefore one
chamber was given to population, and the other, the Senate, to the
states on equal terms. Every citizen was made subject to the federal
government as well as to that of his own state. The powers of the
states were limited. The powers of the federal government were
actually enumerated, and thus the states and the union were a check on
each other. That principle of division was the most efficacious
restraint on democracy that has been devised; for the temper of the
Constitutional Convention was as conservative as the Declaration of
Independence was revolutionary.
The Federal Constitution did not deal with the question of religious
liberty. The rules for the election of the president and for that of
the vice-president proved a failure. Slavery was deplored, was
denounced, and was retained. The absence of a definition of State
Rights led to the most sanguinary civil war of modern times. Weighed
in the scales of Liberalism the instrument, as it stood, was a
monstrous fraud. And yet, by the development of the principle of
Federalism, it has produced a community more powerful, more
prosperous, more intelligent, and more free than any other which the
world has seen.