THE THEORY OF EMPIRE
In the last chapter we mentioned the change that was to take place in
the relations between New England and the mother-country in the years
following the Restoration. That change was one of practical politics
rather than of theory, which latter had been but little altered from the
beginning of the colonial settlement, although the exigencies of events
in England had largely prevented its being translated into a consistent
course of action. In order to understand the imperial theory of the day,
and to appraise the wisdom and justice of the positions taken both by
England and by her colonies, it is necessary to shift our standpoint
temporarily, and to study the empire from its centre, and not from one
of its less important outposts. Business men in contact with large
affairs are familiar with the relations that exist between the central
administrative office of a great corporation—whose sources of raw
materials, producing plants, and selling agencies may be scattered over
half a continent—and the local manager of one of its units. If we
consult the latter, we may learn of local conditions as they affect him,
and, perhaps, of his grievances against the policy of the corporation;
but if we would properly understand the whole situation, we must study
it at the centre of the entire complicated system.
The New England colonies were but parts, and, at this period,
unimportant parts, of such a system. Not only can their history not be
understood, if we attempt to trace it without reference to England, but
neither can their relations with that country, unless we take the entire
colonial organization into account. The colonies were not independent
states.[713]
Footnote 713:
_Cf._ W. MacDonald, “A neglected Point of View in American Colonial
History,” _American Historical Association Report_, 1902, vol. I, pp.
171 _ff._
They were not even, primarily, independent states in the making. The
fact that a few of them, which happened to have a continent at their
back and unlimited room for expansion, revolted after a century and a
half, has tended to obscure their real contemporary relation to England,
much as the refraction of water alters the apparent position of objects
under it when seen from an angle. The angle from which we Americans
always look at the original colonies is that of our present independent
nation; but by doing so we unwittingly shift their position from
integral parts of a complicated imperial system to incipient independent
commonwealths, assumed to have been unjustly held in thraldom. Needless
to say, such a viewpoint vitiates our appraisal of every contemporary
act and opinion. It is possible that after some hundreds of years the
present United States may be divided into two or more nations; but
to-day they form one system, and no one would think of interpreting the
present relations between North and South, or East and West, in the
light of a possible separation centuries hence. In the same way, the
relations between England and her colonies in the seventeenth century
should be interpreted in the light of their then actual and prospective
union and the political theories current, and not in that of a
subsequent, and more or less accidental, separation, and of the wholly
different theories of a later age.[714]
Footnote 714:
I speak of the separation as accidental, not because the forces then
at work did not make it almost inevitable, but because altered
economic theories and scientific discoveries, the latter largely
eliminating the extremely important elements, in the original problem,
of time and distance, occurred a half-century after the separation
took place. Had they occurred sooner, they might have prevented it, as
they have been largely instrumental in holding the remainder of the
empire together and greatly adding to it. The influence of free-trade,
steam, and electricity has been of vast importance in imperial
politics.
When James I ascended the throne of England, the British Empire was not
in existence. The map of the world would have been searched in vain for
any settlement of English men on English soil outside of the British
Isles. When, less than half a dozen decades later, the third Stuart
returned from “his travels,” amidst the acclaims of the nation, it was
to become the head of an empire which already encircled the globe. From
Newfoundland to the Caribbean, English colonies stretched in a great arc
upon islands and mainland, while the Bermudas, equidistant, roughly
speaking, from all its parts, formed a strategic centre far out in the
Atlantic. Across that ocean, Fort Comantine on the coast of Guinea
protected the African slave-trade, and the fortified island of St.
Helena was a half-way station for the Indian fleets. Passing around the
Cape, the next English possession was Gombroon, on the Persian Gulf;
while, still farther east, in India, lay the factories on the Madras and
Bombay shores and the Bay of Bengal. Beyond those, again, English
traders were permanently established on Sumatra, Java, and the Celebes.
Such an imperial structure could not have been raised in less than the
allotted three-score years and ten of individual life by a practice
wholly tyrannical, or a colonial theory wholly false.
The great trans-oceanic empires which were attempted in the seventeenth
century by the leading European powers were political phenomena of an
absolutely new type. Neither the colonies of the city-states of Greece,
nor the slow continental expansion of Rome offered any adequate parallel
to the political results of the age of discovery, or any solutions of
the problems created.[715] Of those new empires, the English not only
has proved the most lasting and the greatest, but has secured, from its
very beginning, the largest comparative amount of freedom to the
colonists. Assertions have often been made that its development has been
unintentional and unconscious; that the English race, as the phrase
goes, has peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. This is
true only in the sense that the Empire's growth has been slow, normal,
and unhurried, and that its strength has lain in the character of the
people rather than in any consistent policy of aggression upon the part
of their rulers. That it has been unconscious in the sense that it has
been unobserved is, of course, disproved by the contemporary literature
relating to imperial problems in almost every decade from the sixteenth
century to the present day; while the wars of the entire seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries were largely caused by trade and colonial
questions.[716]
Footnote 715:
_Cf._ E. A. Freeman, _Greater Greece and Greater Britain_ (London,
1886); C. P. Lucas, _Greater Rome and Greater Britain_ (Oxford, 1912).
Footnote 716:
J. R. Seeley, _Expansion of England_ (London, 1884), pp. 110 _ff._
Englishmen could not emigrate to distant parts of the world, and found
settlements, without, in many and serious ways, involving the English
nation—and that apart from the fact that the soil on which the most
populous of the colonies grew up was the unquestioned property of the
English Crown. From the very beginning of colonization, therefore, even
before any permanent success had been achieved, we find the question
being discussed as to what use, if any, to the English people were these
distant settlements, with their possible disadvantages and certain
responsibilities.[717]
Footnote 717:
The beginnings of the discussion were noted in an earlier chapter. For
the view at the end of the 19th century, _cf._ C. P. Lucas's
Introduction, in Lewis, _Government of Dependencies_ (Oxford, 1891),
pp. xlv _ff._
If the establishment of the British Empire was not the result of
absent-mindedness, neither was it prompted by motives of philanthropy
toward generations yet unborn in countries overseas. Exploration,
settlement, far-distant foreign trade, ensuing wars with competing
powers, and the policing of trade-routes, were costly and hazardous
matters, and not to be undertaken without the prospect of very tangible
rewards of one sort or another. As we endeavored to show in an earlier
chapter, the main underlying motive that led to the great discoveries of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and, in the main, to the
colonizing movements of the seventeenth, was economic. It was,
therefore, entirely natural that the speculation as to the advantages
and disadvantages of empire, and as to the relations of England to her
dependencies, should be based upon the economic theories of the day. The
question, moreover, as to what advantages, if any, would accrue from
founding, or allowing to be founded, colonies not yet in existence, was
almost necessarily, what those advantages would be for England herself.
After the Empire had come into existence, the point of view shifted
somewhat, and, theoretically, the question became one of what advantage
a policy might prove to the Empire as a whole, although, as its greatest
aggregation of wealth and population, the source of protection, the seat
of power, the centre of all exchanges, in a word, the heart of empire,
the local interests of England would still outweigh those of any of the
dependencies. In no case would those at the head of the imperial
government, aside from selfish motives, of which there were plenty, have
thought it the part of either wisdom or justice to uphold the citizens
of any one colony in a course that seemed to run counter to the
interests of the Empire as a whole.
We have already noted how the breaking up of the unity of Christendom by
the development of state churches was but a phase of the operation of
new forces at work, at the beginning of the modern era, which were
moulding men's thoughts and emotions along national lines. In their
religious aspect, these gave rise to the post-Reformation churches, and
in their political aspect, to the growth of the modern state. They were
equally powerful in the economic field; and the so-called Mercantile
Theory, which was the ground of the imperial theories of the time, was
but the reasoned expression of this nationalizing of the economic life
of the peoples. In the Middle Ages, the life of the individual, in its
various relations, had been decentralized. In his political allegiance
he had looked one way, in his religious another, and in his economic
still another. The growing strength of the feeling of nationality was
gradually drawing all toward a common centre.
The balance of trade, which forms one of the essential features of the
Mercantile Theory, was not a new conception. It was, however, of great
practical influence upon economic doctrine and state policies when
applied to the nations. After speaking of how a merchant balances his
private books, and how the head of a family looks after his estate, an
early writer goes on to say that “the Royall Merchant, the Regall Father
of that great family of a Kingdom, if He will know the Estate of his
Kingdome, Hee will compare the Gaine thereof with the Expense; that is,
the Native Commodities issued and sent out, with the Forraine
Commodities received in; and if it appeare that the Forraine Commodities
doe exceed the Native, either he must increase the Native, or lessen the
Forraine, or else looke for nothing else, but the Decay of Trade and
therein the losse of his Revenue, and Impoverishing of his People.”[718]
Footnote 718:
E. M[isselden], _The Circle of Commerce or the Ballance of Trade_
(London, 1623), p. 131.
This theory was developed into a system by Mun, who affirmed that the
best method to “increase our wealth and treasure is by Forraign Trade,
wherein wee must ever observe this rule; to sell more to strangers
yearly than wee consume of theirs in value.”[719] The effects of this
doctrine were vastly increased and modified by the current belief that
the precious metals constituted the real wealth of a kingdom, and that
its whole trade, therefore, should be considered mainly in reference to
the resultant balance with foreigners in gold and silver. For example,
Mun states that if pepper be worth twenty pence in Amsterdam, and
threepence in the East Indies, it is a gain to the nation to buy it in
the latter, even though the freight and other charges make it cost more
in England than if it were imported from Holland, because those charges
are paid by Englishmen to Englishmen, so that only threepence in actual
coin leaves the country, as compared with twenty. In this particular, he
points out, his countrymen “must ever distinguish between the gain of
the kingdom, and the profit of the Merchant.”[720]
Footnote 719:
Thomas Mun, _England's Treasure by Forraign Trade_, 1664 (ed. New
York, 1910), p. 7. _Cf._ J. R. McCulloch, _A Short Collection of Early
English Tracts on Commerce_ (London, 1856), p. vi.
Footnote 720:
Mun, _England's Treasure_, p. 14. In his defense of the East India
Company, he advanced upon his predecessors in advocating the export of
bullion, if, as a direct result, a larger amount could be shown to be
imported. _Cf._ chaps. V and VI of his _Considerations on the East
India Trade_ (London, 1701); reprinted in _Early English Tracts_, pp.
1-49.
The effect of this theory upon the questions of colonization and
colonial policy was profound. “I conceive, no forein Plantation should
be undertaken or prosecuted,” wrote Samuel Fortrey, “but in such
countreys that may increase the wealth and trade of this nation, either
in furnishing us, with what we are otherwise forced to purchase from
strangers, or else by increasing such commodities, as are vendible
abroad; which may both increase our shipping, and profitably employ our
people; but otherwise, it is always carefully to be avoided, especially
where the charge is greater than the profit, for we want not already a
countrey sufficient for double our people, were they rightly employed;
and a Prince is more powerfull that hath his strength and force united,
then he that is weakly scattered in many places.”[721] Granted the
assumptions that real wealth consists only of the precious metals, and
that, in a country without mines, these can be acquired only as a result
of a favorable trade with strangers, the colonial theory of the European
nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was as logical as it
was patriotic. The assumptions may have been wrong, but in this, as in
so many other cases, we must remember that delusions are “as effective
in social evolution as are unassailable facts.”[722]
Footnote 721:
_England's Interest and Improvement_, 1663; reprint, Johns Hopkins
University, 1907, p. 35.
Footnote 722:
G. L. Beer, _The Old Colonial System_ (New York, 1912), vol. I, p. 37.
The _pacte coloniale_, therefore, was, in some of its aspects, similar
to the ideal of the modern “trust,” which would combine in one enormous
organization the sources of its raw materials, its means of
transportation, manufacturing plants, and selling agencies. The ideal
empire, according to the Mercantile Theory, would embrace the home
country, which, aside from the production of certain raw materials, was,
in the main, the source of credit, the seat of manufactures, the selling
agency to the world for the whole empire, the centre of administration,
and the protective power to guard the system. The colonies in the
temperate zone were to supply the typical products of their regions, the
East and West Indies materials found in the tropics, and the African
stations the supply of negro labor.
It must be distinctly remembered that this was not merely an English
ideal. It was the end toward which the most advanced European nations
were striving in building up their empires according to what was then
considered as unquestionably the soundest economic doctrine. France,
under Colbert, was endeavoring, with a logical rigor that was not
equaled by the English, to erect just such a completely balanced system.
She, too, had her North American temperate-zone colony in Canada, her
fishing fleets off Newfoundland, her West Indian possessions, her
African supply in Senegal, and her factories in the East Indies.[723]
Footnote 723:
Mims, _Colbert's West Indian Policy_, pp. 8, 315, 319, 335.
Such a system, closed against the world, presupposed that every part
would be willing to subordinate itself to the theoretical needs of the
whole, and that the production of every unit could be so nicely adjusted
in nature and amount as to maintain the internal balances, and allow the
home country, as the selling agency, to establish a favorable balance
with the world external to the empire. Although some of the nations,
notably England and France, were able to block out empires so located,
as to their parts, as apparently to fulfil the requirements, no such
perfect adjustment of colonial production could ever be reached as to
fit the needs of the theory; while its logic, seemingly so perfect, left
out of account the fact that the colonists were human beings, who would
surely develop their own local interests, troubles, and aspirations, and
not insensible parts of a great machine.
The English Empire was the most complete embodiment of the ideal. The
factories in the Spice Islands and on the coasts of India supplied the
products of the Orient, not to be obtained elsewhere. Africa provided
the negroes, upon whose labor was based the production of sugar in the
West Indies, which formed one of the mainstays of the Empire's commerce.
St. Helena and Bermuda were strategic points on the Indian and American
trade-routes. Virginia and Maryland were wholly devoted to the staple
crop of tobacco, which was another of the important elements in British
trade. The fisheries of Newfoundland provided England with an article to
exchange with the Catholic countries of southern Europe for the wine,
salt, and other products imported from them; and they fitted in
perfectly with the imperial scheme.[724] All these distant possessions,
by employing an increasing amount of shipping, under the laws to be
mentioned later, built up the merchant fleet upon which rested England's
naval power and her ability to defend the Empire; while all of them
consumed English manufactured goods.
Footnote 724:
Beer, _Old Colonial System_, vol. I, pp. 319 _ff._; _Origins of the
British Colonial System_, p. 294; Osgood, _American Colonies_, pp.
111, 139 _ff._
New England, however, did not fit into this elaborate and delicately
adjusted trade-machine. In spite of her enormous forest-resources, which
had been counted upon to provide the Empire with naval stores and
timber, she failed utterly in competition with the countries on the
Baltic.[725] Her agricultural products were practically identical with
those of the old country, and so competed with them. There was no staple
crop, like sugar or tobacco, to form an element of imperial commerce.
Her fisheries, which had loomed so large at the time of the first
settlement, served, for various reasons, only to compete with those of
Newfoundland, and at once to reduce England's profits and to retard the
increase of her fishing fleet. The purely colonial shipping, which the
New England colonies early produced, drew away English seamen, competed
with English vessels, and reduced the naval strength of the
mother-country. Following the economic crisis of 1640, Massachusetts and
her sister colonies made strenuous and partly successful efforts to
establish home manufactures, which curtailed the market for English
goods.[726] As, even then, those colonies imported much more from
England than they exported to her, they had to seek an outlet for such
products as were not adapted for the English trade, in order to obtain
the money to settle their English bills. The West Indian colonies, on
the other hand, exported to England far more than they imported.
Consequently New England sold her timber and provisions to the island
settlements, and used their bills of exchange to pay her English debts.
In this, however, she seemed to be in part merely drawing away the
trade-balance of the West Indies by increasing her competition with the
home-country.[727] Nor, as the shrewd and thrifty New England merchants
grew in numbers and in wealth, did the English West Indian islands
afford them sufficient outlet for their commercial energies; and there
gradually developed that system of trade with the French island-group
which was to be one of the causes of the Revolution.[728]
Footnote 725:
Efforts were continually made, however, to secure naval stores from
her. _Cf._, under the Commonwealth, _Cal. State Pap., Col.,
1574-1660_, pp. 392, 399.
Footnote 726:
_Cf._ J. Winthrop, _History_, vol. II, pp. 29 _f._; V. S. Clark,
_Manufacturing in the U. S._, pp. 31, 34, 40, 50.
Footnote 727:
Beer, _Origins_, pp. 268, 285 _f._; _Old Colonial System_, vol. II,
pp. 210, 221, 230 _ff._
Footnote 728:
Mims, _Colbert's West Indian Policy_, pp. 224, _f._
When we add to this economic maladjustment, according to the current
theory, the unique position of the New England colonies as chartered or
practically independent governments, it is obvious how anomalous their
relations were to the imperial scheme. From the standpoint of
contemporary opinion, it was not unnatural that they should be regarded
by many as “the unfortunate results of misdirected efforts.” Nor was it
merely that they failed to fit in with the rest of the Empire. As they
grew in population, and in their avowed independence of all external
control of any sort, many an Englishman must have felt the fear
expressed by one of the ablest economic writers of the latter part of
the Empire's first century. Of all the American plantations, D'Avenant
wrote in 1698, New England “is the most proper for building ships and
breeding seamen, and their soil affords plenty of cattle; besides which,
they have good fisheries, so that, if we should go to cultivate among
them the art of navigation, and teach them to have a naval force, they
may set up for themselves, and make the greatest part of our West-Indian
Trade precarious,” as well as absorbing the colonial carrying trade and
merchandizing.[729] It has, indeed, been conjectured that Cromwell's
attempt, in 1665, to induce a large number of the New Englanders to
emigrate to the newly conquered island of Jamaica derived directly from
the failure of their colonies to fit into the mercantile empire,[730]
although, to the present writer, other economic and military motives
seem quite as likely.[731]
Footnote 729:
C. D'Avenant, “On the Plantation Trade, 1698,” in his _Discourses on
the Public Revenue, etc._ (London, 1771), vol. II, p. 9; _Cal. State
Pap., Col., 1574-1660_, p. 430.
Footnote 730:
_New Haven Colonial Records_, vol. I, p. 180; G. L. Beer, “Cromwell's
Policy in its Economic Aspects,” _Political Science Quarterly_, vol.
XVI, p. 611.
Footnote 731:
The main idea seems to have been the peopling of the island with
English—"from Nevis, St. Christopher's, New England, or any of the
other plantations in America." _Cal. State Pap., Col., 1574-1660_, pp.
450, 453. _Cf._ also F. Strong, “The Causes of Cromwell's West Indian
Expedition,” _American Historical Review_, vol. IV, pp. 229 _ff._; I.
S., _A brief and perfect Journal of the late proceedings and success_,
etc. (London, 1655), pp. 2 _ff._; _The Clarke Papers_ (Camden Society,
1899), pp. 203 _ff._
From this theory of empire sprang certain practical corollaries. In part
to avoid allowing foreigners to benefit from the imperial trade, and to
retain the carrying profits within the Empire, but mainly to build up
the merchant fleet, it was decreed that all goods must be transported in
vessels belonging to the mother-country or her colonies. Foreign goods,
according to the theory, would have to be excluded as far as possible
from the colonial markets, the products of the latter limited to the
English market, and colonial manufacturing restrained so as not to
compete with home-made goods, although the theory was never fully
translated into practice. On the other hand, as a partial offset to such
laws as were passed, which mainly redounded to the benefit of England so
far as their direct results were concerned, colonial produce was, to
some extent, given preferential treatment in that country, and, in some
important particulars, Englishmen were forbidden to compete with the
colonists. The colonies were also afforded protection against the
aggression of foreign nations. No colony could possibly have remained
independent. The choice was not between the English Empire and
independence, but between being subject to Protestant and, as the world
went then, liberal England, or to Catholic France or Spain.
As we have already said, in the second half of the seventeenth century,
Colbert, the great minister of Louis XIV, was applying the Mercantile
doctrine to the upbuilding of the French overseas empire with a rigor
that the English never attained. When he excluded all foreign vessels
from the French colonial carrying-trade, there was, as yet, no
sufficient French merchant fleet to serve colonial needs, and the West
India planters were brought to the verge of starvation and ruin. If they
“were hungry, barefooted and in rags,” writes the historian of Colbert's
policy, “they must count these things as a bit of temporary suffering,
to be endured for the upbuilding of French commerce. They must wait for
the law of supply and demand to operate and bring them, sooner or later,
an abundance from France.... But he was demanding too much. What meant
the noble idea of restoring French commerce and the upbuilding of a
mighty colonial empire to the planters in the West Indies, whose empty
bellies were crying for food, whose nakedness demanded to be
clothed?”[732] Nor were the colonial measures of the other nations less
repressive.[733] Both religious and economic interests, therefore, made
it desirable that the English colonies should remain within the English
Empire; and it was the power of England alone which enabled them to do
so. For it was not a question, for example, of the sturdy New England
settlers warding off attacks from the far fewer French inhabitants of
Canada. No colony was self-supporting or economically self-contained.
Cut off from access to the mother-country, deprived of her protection on
the ocean trade-routes, they would inevitably wither and die, or be
absorbed into one of the rival and less liberal empires.[734] The
allegiance of the colonists of various nations was in only slight
measure determined by their own comparative strengths, and almost wholly
by the naval powers of the home countries.
Footnote 732:
Mims, _Colbert's West Indian Policy_, p. 194.
Footnote 733:
_Cf._ Dutch prohibition of colonial manufactures, in Egerton, _Origin
and Growth of British Dominions_, p. 118 _n._; Beer, _Old Colonial
System_, vol. I, p. 150, for Portuguese policy.
Footnote 734:
For an example of the work England did in policing the trade routes,
_cf._ the case of the King David. Sailing from Newfoundland to
Tangier, she met with Algerine pirates off Cape St. Vincent, whom she
fought off in a three-days running fight. Later, meeting with “Five
Pirats more,” she was forced to surrender. A few days later, she was
rescued by a ship of the English navy; but the two vessels meeting
with “Six Pirats more,” the King David was a second time captured, to
be rescued once again some days later by another English ship, and
safely escorted into Malaga. _Acts Privy Council, Colonial,
1613-1680_, pp. xxxvi, 541.
Such, in brief outline, was the European theory of empire held during
our colonial period, some of the main features in the practical
application of which can be traced back for several centuries before
ever the question of empire arose, as we have indicated in our earlier
chapters.[735] The old life of the Middle Ages, which had been largely
municipal, had become national. The extraordinary energy of the new
period, facing an entire globe to be appropriated and exploited, rapidly
developed national spirit into imperial ambition, and the old ideas and
practices of a small and legally restricted commerce had to be suddenly
adapted and enlarged to meet a situation unprecedented in history. The
surprising fact is not that, in so many ways, the theory and practice of
empire-making should have contained errors and worked injustices, but
that one which, after all, proved highly successful, should have been
developed so immediately and so surely.
Footnote 735:
_Cf._ also Osgood, _American Colonies_, vol. III, pp. 195 _ff._
Until comparatively recently, the Mercantile Theory was regarded as a
sinister device to give play to the selfish profiteering of the English
merchant-class. It is, however, coming more and more to be recognized as
a necessary step in the evolution of the modern state. “What was at
stake,” writes Schmoller, who was the leader in these newer views, “was
the creation of real _political_ economies as unified organisms, the
centre of which should be, not merely a state policy reaching out in all
directions, but rather the living heart-beat of a united sentiment. Only
he who thus conceives of mercantilism will understand it; in its
innermost kernel it is nothing but state-making, not state-making in a
narrow sense, but state-making and national-economy-making at the same
time; state-making in the modern sense, which creates out of the
political community an economic community, and so gives it a heightened
meaning. The essence of the system,” he adds, “lies not in some doctrine
of money, or of the balance of trade; not in tariff barriers, protective
duties, or navigation laws; but in something far greater, namely, in the
total transformation of society and its organization, as well as of the
state and its institutions; in the replacing of a local and territorial
economic policy by that of the national state.”[736]
Footnote 736:
G. Schmoller, _The Mercantile System and its Historical Significance_
(New York, 1896), pp. 49 _ff._
Modern critics of the theory have been prone to lay stress upon the
obvious defects and shortcomings which appear in the workings of the
enactments designed to translate it into practice. As a matter of fact,
the policy proved successful, in spite of the eventual loss to England,
a century later, of a portion of her colonies; while in a different and
higher form, that of an imperial federated _Zollverein_, it is still
regarded by many as the solution of the possibly insoluble problem of
imperial government.
In a speech at the Savoy, in London, in 1917, the Premier of
Newfoundland, England's oldest colony, gave notable expression to such a
return to the policy of an earlier day. “This Empire,” he said, “cannot
live as a political empire unless it is developed as an economic empire.
All the raw material produced in the Empire should be manufactured in
the Empire before it leaves the Empire, and nothing should be admitted
into the Empire that could be produced in the Empire.”[737] Let us not
condemn too hastily the economic theories of the seventeenth century
until we are quite sure whither those of the twentieth are to lead us.
Footnote 737:
Sir Edward Morris, Speech at the Savoy, March 14, 1917. Given in
London _Times_, March 15, p. 6, col. 3.
The strength of an ocean empire lies wholly in sea-power, and the roots
of sea-power in the merchant marine. By her application of the
Mercantile Theory, England forced the Dutch, who had “run hackney all
the world over,” from the carrying-trade of her colonies; and for all
the centuries since, she has been the great commercial nation of the
world. France, who abandoned Colbert's policy, and turned her back on
the sea in 1672, embarking upon a career of Continental conquest, was,
during the next century, to be beaten by England single-handed for the
first time since the Middle Ages, to have her merchant shipping swept
away, and to lose Martinique, Guadaloupe, Canada, and India to her
rival.[738]
Footnote 738:
_Cf._ A. T. Mahan, _Influence of Sea Power upon History_ (Boston,
1898), pp. 88, 540, 73, 75 _f._
It has too frequently been assumed to be an obvious conclusion that the
Navigation Acts of the seventeenth century were a colossal blunder,
because, in part, the commercial policy of England lost her the
continental colonies in the eighteenth. Those who would commit
themselves to such a view might well determine whether, had England not
made use of the weapons of the earlier century, and thus developed that
naval power which alone enabled her to protect her American possessions,
she would have had any colonies left, continental or other, to be kept
or lost by any policies which she might adopt in the later period.
Having glanced at the theory of empire as it was understood by those at
home, we must turn to consider the measures adopted to reduce it to
practice, and also the views of imperial relations held by the
colonists.
We may again emphasize the fact that the colonies were dependencies of
England, and not independent nations. It was as much the right and duty
of England to assert and maintain some sort of imperial control over
them as it has been of the United States to do the same over her own
territorial possessions. The colonists were Englishmen, settled upon
English lands, subject to English laws, entitled to the rights of
Englishmen at home, protected by English power. The control exercised
over them was not that of a foreign nation, or imposed by conquest; and
the mere fact that some control should be exercised could not in itself
be construed as an act of oppression or tyranny. Had the waste lands on
which these emigrating Englishmen settled been contiguous to the borders
of any English county, none of the questions that arose as to their
relations to English sovereignty would have arisen. They were all due to
the distance, translated into time, that separated these English
subjects from the seat of authority, and to the new conditions of their
strange environment. From those two elements, “arose all that was
peculiar and exceptional in their relations with the British
government.”[739]
Footnote 739:
Osgood, _American Colonies_, vol. III, pp. 4 _f._; “The English
colonies, however, were not sister communities of England, but
dependent local jurisdictions for whose welfare and safety the
mother-country had assumed the responsibility.” Beer, _Origins_, p.
301. For discussion of the element of distance, _cf._ Lucas, _Greater
Rome and Greater Britain_, pp. 32 _ff._
At the time when the New England colonies were planted, the doctrine of
Parliamentary sovereignty, of the supreme authority in the state of that
body which had hitherto been regarded rather as a judicial than a
legislative one, was beginning to take hold of men's minds. It required,
however, the ordeal by battle of a civil war to decide the question; and
it was not until the Restoration that Parliament took its permanent
place among English institutions.[740] The close connection of the
colonies with the Crown arose from the fact that, during the period of
their founding, their relations to the government of England were mainly
with the Executive and as occupiers of the soil, the executive power
being then lodged in the King in Council, and the title to the land
being vested in the Crown.[741] As the constitutional situation
gradually altered, the colonies remained, of course, subject to the
sovereign power, wherever located, as did Englishmen at home, although
so complex, and difficult of both legal and equitable settlement, were
the questions of sovereignty in the Empire raised by the phenomena of
overseas dominions, that it is highly questionable whether their
solution has ever been found. Only a few years ago, a brilliant
Englishman could speak of the bonds then uniting England and her
colonies as “a confusion of legal formulas and brittle sympathies”; and
although, as tested in the world-crisis of the Great War, those
sympathies have proved anything but brittle, his conclusion that
imperial sovereignty is, in reality, non-existent, seems
irrefutable.[742] The ship of state to-day, compared to that of the
seventeenth century, is as a dreadnought to the Mayflower; but if, after
three centuries, the problem of imperial organization is yet awaiting
solution, with the best of will on the part of both England and the
dominions, there need be little surprise, and certainly no bitterness,
over the slow and blundering beginnings. Unfortunately, owing to the
uncertainty, in the course of England's political evolution, as to where
sovereignty really lay, and also to the inherent difficulties involved
in the question of the realm and the dominions, alluded to in an earlier
chapter, the way was all too open for controversial misunderstandings on
purely technical grounds between the colonies and the mother-country.
And this quite apart from the difficulties raised by distance, and the
attempted course of Stuart usurpation, against which latter, it must be
remembered, the forces of freedom were to struggle in old England as
well as in her colonies.
Footnote 740:
C. H. McIlwain, _The High Court of Parliament and its Supremacy_ (Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1910), pp. 109, 158, 352 _ff._, 137, 145.
Footnote 741:
Osgood, _American Colonies_, vol. III, p. 15; C. M. Andrews, _British
Committees_, p. 10.
Footnote 742:
F. S. Oliver, _Alexander Hamilton_ (London, n.d.), pp. 450, 447.
During the period covered by this volume, control over the colonies was
asserted in various ways and at various times by both Parliament and the
Crown. Patentees of the royal charters not infrequently asked Parliament
to confirm their privileges; while that body often inquired into the use
which was being made of those monopolistic documents; for it is
sometimes forgotten that such a charter as that obtained by
Massachusetts, for example, while regarded by the company as the basis
of its liberties, could also, quite as legitimately, be regarded by the
nation as creating a monopoly in one of its worst forms—that of the
exclusive use of the Crown, or public, lands. For the most part,
however, Parliament confined itself to passing legislation regarding
trade only, its control over the customs being continuous from
1641.[743]
Footnote 743:
Osgood, _American Colonies_, vol. III, p. 14; Beer, _Origins_, p. 341;
_Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum_ (London, 1911), vol. II, p.
425.
Those who intended to found plantations necessarily had to apply to the
king for a charter, in order to obtain possession of the soil and
exemption from certain laws covering emigration and export. Technically,
the charters of the corporate colonies ranked merely with those of
English municipal corporations. According to a strict interpretation of
the law, therefore, so long as the private rights of individuals were
not infringed, the English government would be technically justified in
altering colonial institutions, or in dividing and combining colonies,
without the consent of the inhabitants.[744] As is always the case, old
laws and institutions were slightly altered by the use of legal fictions
and by modifications in practice, to meet the needs of a new situation.
It is unthinkable that an entirely new body of law, and a wholly new set
of institutions, should have been created, to serve political
contingencies that could by no means have been foreseen.
Footnote 744:
Osgood, _American Colonies_, vol. III, pp. 7 _ff._ The provinces were
the equivalents of English counties.
The element of distance again came into play, to alter profoundly the
practical effect of legal technicalities. In England the sovereign
power, in exercising its jurisdiction over municipalities, had local
knowledge of conditions, and could take immediate and effective action.
Moreover, even when the citizens of the municipality were not
represented in Parliament, they were yet largely protected from acts of
oppression by the fact that such acts were prevented by the
self-defensive foresight of other municipalities, which were
represented. The situation in regard to the colonies was entirely
different. Owing to the distance which separated them from home, it was
impossible that either the king or Parliament could have accurate
knowledge of local conditions, or take prompt measures. The difficulties
as to both these points, in the unsettled state of England in the
earlier part of the seventeenth century, were responsible for the
extraordinary freedom which the colonists enjoyed from interference in
their domestic political affairs. In addition, as their local conditions
were little understood, and of but slight moment to the bulk of
Englishmen at home, and as the interests of one colony frequently
conflicted with those of another differently situated, their rights, in
the absence of parliamentary representation, did not possess even that
vicarious protection enjoyed by their legal equivalents, the
unrepresented municipal corporations in England. Of necessity,
therefore, colonial interests, from the standpoint of the colonists,
were bound to be in part neglected by England, and in part
misunderstood, while they served, to a far greater extent than was
possible with those of any class or body at home, as the hunting-ground
of rival cliques of self-interested individuals or groups.
Down to 1643, when Parliament, as a result of the Civil War, assumed the
position of executive head of the government, colonial affairs had been
in the hands of the King in Council, and had been managed by a
succession of committees, sub-committees, and commissions, one of which
we have already encountered on the other side of the water at the time
of the troubles over the Massachusetts charter.[745] During the period
of the Interregnum, these were replaced by a tangle of committees of
Parliament and the Protector's Council, none of which were continuous,
or able to formulate and carry through a consistent policy. We have
already seen the results of the administrative confusion, in the
opportunity which it gave the New England colonies, and of which they
made full use, to develop their local institutions and policy in almost
entire disregard of their position in the Empire.
Footnote 745:
_Cf._ Andrews, _British Committees_, pp. 12 _ff._; P. L. Kaye, _The
Colonial Executive prior to the Restoration_ (J. H. U. S.), pp. 55
_ff._
This almost complete absence of any steady policy or consistent control
over the component parts of the imperial structure not only was
unacceptable to the merchants at home, but would probably have been
destructive of the Empire had it continued without change. Certain
measures of far-reaching importance, however, had already been enacted
under Cromwell; and the Restoration, which strengthened the government
and united the people, enabled England to undertake a more comprehensive
scheme for imperial organization, although in New England, owing to the
incorrigible tendencies of the Stuarts, it blundered into criminal
folly.
At first, two councils were created, one for Trade, and the other for
Plantations, their instructions largely following drafts prepared by the
London merchants Povey and Noell, who had for some years been actively
engaged in the study of colonial questions, and the formulation of a
colonial policy.[746] However these instructions might strike colonists
who refused to acknowledge any right of control whatever by the
mother-country, they could not but appear wise and just to the statesmen
and citizens at home. The councillors were ordered, in the first place,
to make a complete survey—by means of correspondence with the colonial
governors—of the laws and institutions, population and means of defense
of each colony. They were to study “means for the rendering those
dominions usefull to England, and England helpful to them, and for the
bringing the several Colonies and Plantations, within themselves, into a
more certain civill and uniforme waie of government and for the better
ordering and distributing of publique justice among them.” They were,
further, to maintain a correspondence with the local authorities in the
several colonies, so that they might have constant knowledge of “their
complaints, their wants, their abundance,” and their shipping, the
latter for revision of the Navigation Laws. Finally, they were to study
the methods employed by other states in their colonial government, and
to call experts to their assistance in any particular when needed.[747]
The Council was made up of able men, almost all of them authorities on
colonial questions, and in close touch with the colonies, while the
business, in the first instance, was frequently entrusted to
experts.[748] Of the work of the Council, Professor Andrews writes, that
“there was not an important phase of colonial life and government, not a
colonial claim or dispute, that was not considered carefully,
thoroughly, and in the main, impartially.”[749] In fact, an unbiased
study of the actions taken by the Privy Council and its committees
during nearly the whole of the seventeenth century leads one to agree
with the editor of the Acts, that, as a governing body, it was “anxious
to help, willing to take advice, free from preconception.”[750]
Footnote 746:
Andrews, _British Committees_, pp. 38, 56, 67 _ff._
Footnote 747:
Andrews, _British Committees_, where the texts of the Instructions and
of Povey's Overtures are both given.
Footnote 748:
The membership included Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, who had served on
Plantation Committees during the Interregnum; Robert Boyle, President
of the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England;
Sir Peter Leere and Sir James Draxe, old Barbadian planters; Povey,
Noell, Digges, and Colleton, all merchants and experts on colonial
trade. _Ibid._, pp. 76 _f._
Footnote 749:
_Ibid._, p. 76.
Footnote 750:
_Acts Privy Council, Colonial, 1613-1680_, p. xi.
The only individual connecting link between New England and the
government in England was the unofficial “agent” whom one or another of
the colonies appointed at times of crisis, such as the Hocking murder or
the Dr. Child petition, to present their case to the authorities.
Although unofficial, the office was recognized by the English
government, and such agents were employed by most of the colonies,
island as well as continental, the office becoming an integral part of
the administrative machinery of the following century.[751]
Footnote 751:
_Cf._ L. P. Kellogg, “The American Colonial Charter,” _Annual Report,
American Historical Association_, 1903, vol. I, p. 228; E. P. Tanner,
“Colonial Agencies in England during the 18th Century,” _Political
Science Quarterly_, vol. XVI, pp. 24 _ff._
Such, in bare outline, were the organs employed by England in the
administration of the colonies. Of the legislative enactments designed
to build up the Empire, the most important were precursors of the more
famous Navigation Acts of the following century. In 1650, 1651, 1660,
and 1663, ordinances were passed for the control of trade and shipping,
which, in the period now under review, were more important in their
political than in their economic influence upon New England. Holland had
been the first of the European nations to understand the effect upon
economic prosperity at home of the building up of colonial trade, and in
the middle of the seventeenth century threatened to absorb the entire
carrying trade of the world, the value of goods shipped annually in
Dutch bottoms having been estimated at a billion francs.[752] The
English Navigation Acts of Cromwell and Charles II, like the policy
initiated by Colbert in France, were aimed mainly at breaking the
monopoly of Holland, and building up the national merchant-marines of
England and France. Even the fisheries off the coasts of England and
Scotland had passed into Dutch hands, and Englishmen had long been
clamoring for some means of fighting commercially the growing menace of
Dutch sea power.[753]
Footnote 752:
Mahan, _Sea Power_, p. 96. _Cf._ Leroy-Beaulieu, _De la Colonisation
chez les peuples modernes_, vol. I, pp. 113 ff.
Footnote 753:
G. Edmundson, _Anglo-Dutch Rivalry_ (Oxford, 1912), pp. 36 _ff._, 79,
154.
As the effects upon New England, until the following century, were
mainly indirect, it is not necessary to give the details of the various
acts in the order in which they were passed. Their aim was
twofold—destructive and constructive. In the former aspect, they aimed
at diminishing, if not wholly destroying, the shipping, and so both the
commerce and the naval power of competing states. On their constructive
side, their design was to build up the shipping of the English Empire,
and, in reference to certain articles, to make England the sole market
for their trade. As to the first point, the colonies were put upon the
same basis as England herself; and, in exchange for the advantages
derived by her from the second, she offered the colonists certain
privileges in the home markets. It was, therefore, enacted that no trade
could be carried on between England and her dominions except in ships
owned by her or them, and manned by English or colonial crews, the same
restriction applying to all goods imported into either from any foreign
country or colony in America, Asia, and Africa.[754] This was merely an
extension of acts already frequently passed, or provisions in the early
charters, such as we have already noted.
Footnote 754:
Macdonald, _Select Charters_, pp. 106 _ff._, 110 _ff._, 133 _ff._
The other main point, that of limiting the markets in certain goods to
England, was also merely an extension of another long-familiar idea.
When the economic organization, in the later Middle Ages, was still
largely municipal, it had been found advantageous to designate certain
towns as the sole markets, or “staple,” for certain goods. For some
centuries, the belief in the economic soundness of this practice
continued to be held; and, as we noted in the very first charter
relating to America,—that of Cabot, in 1496,—it was required that all
goods should pass through the port of Bristol. The Navigation Act of
Charles II required that certain “enumerated” commodities produced in
the colonies should be sold only in England, and not directly to
foreigners, thus making England the “staple” for the Empire in the same
way in which certain municipalities had formerly been the staples for
the kingdom. Theoretically, the colonists were in the same relative
position to England in the matter as were Englishmen at home to the
staple municipalities, although, of course, the practical disadvantages
and injustice to the colonists were much greater when the scheme was
made imperial.
The list of enumerated commodities in the seventeenth century, however,
was very limited, and no such restrictions were placed upon purely
intercolonial commerce. A number of the most important colonial exports,
such as wheat and fish, were not included; while of the more important
ones named, none were produced in New England, and but one—tobacco—by
any of the American continental colonies. As an offset to the advantages
accruing to England by thus controlling the sale of the enumerated
commodities, that country placed prohibitive duties on many of them when
imported from other countries, thus giving the colonies the monopoly of
the market to which they were limited. In the case of tobacco, which was
successfully grown in England, she incurred the resentment of a
considerable element in her own agricultural classes by forbidding its
culture. So great, indeed, was the opposition to giving the American
planters the monopoly of the English market, that the government had for
many years to use armed forces against its own citizens to keep faith
with the colonies.[755]
Footnote 755:
Tobacco was raised in eighteen English counties, to be trampled down
annually by royal troops of horse, so strongly had both the plant and
the colonial theory, respectively, taken root in English soil and
English minds. _Cf._ Beer, _Origins_, pp. 117 _ff._ _Acts Privy
Council, Colonial, 1613-1680_, pp. xxii _ff._
The only other point of importance in these early acts was the provision
in that of 1663, that no European manufactured goods could be shipped to
the colonies unless first landed in England, Wales, or Berwick. Owing,
however, to a system of drawbacks on the duties paid in these cases,
such goods frequently sold in the colonies at lower prices than they
could be sold for in England itself; and certain exceptions, such as
Portuguese wines, and salt for the fisheries, were of especial benefit
to New England. Indeed, it is noteworthy that the New England colonies,
although the least desirable part of the Empire from the English
standpoint, and constantly giving trouble politically, were nevertheless
accorded particularly considerate treatment from time to time, within
the limits of the imperial system. Under the Commonwealth, in 1644, they
had been exempted from the payment of all English import and export
duties, which naturally gave them a great advantage over the other
colonies, and made them the envy of the Empire.[756] A dozen years
later, by an act of Parliament, foreign ships were allowed to carry fish
from both the Newfoundland and New England fisheries, nullifying to that
extent the Act of 1650; and, after the Restoration, their trade was
specifically exempted from certain onerous clauses in the Navigation
Acts, as then interpreted, although that of the other colonies was
not.[757]
Footnote 756:
_Interregnum, Acts and Ordinances_, vol. I, p. 571.
Footnote 757:
Beer, _Origins_, pp. 397, 114.
As to the success of the above acts, there can now be little question,
and their former condemnation on economic grounds has given place to the
recognition of the fact that they did indeed secure the objects
intended, and that the welfare of the Empire as a whole, as well as that
of England herself, was promoted by them. The merchant marine was
doubled in eighteen years, the Dutch and other competitors beaten off,
and the Empire, and notably New England, greatly increased in power and
wealth.
As we have already indicated, however, European imperial theory in the
seventeenth century had one serious defect. It failed to take account of
human nature in the colonist. Like so many modern theories which
consider the state as all, and the individual as nothing, it made the
blunder of treating the abstraction as human, and the human as an
abstraction. It asked too much of the individual, and, entirely apart
from selfish motives, which were found in the colonies quite as much as
in the mother-country, it almost of necessity subordinated the interests
of the former to those of the latter. The success of the Empire as a
whole was doubtless far more dependent upon the strength and prosperity
of England than upon the fortunes of any individual colony; but that was
a point of view more likely to be appreciated by the contemporary
citizens at home, and the historians of a later day, than by the
contemporary colonist, who saw his particular interests made to suffer
for those of the Empire, and his local pride constantly wounded by a
sense of subordination to a power three thousand miles away. For in all
the difficulties between England and her colonies, we continually have
to come back to the element of distance. What made the acts of the
government seem autocratic was not the fact that the colonists were not
directly represented in Parliament,—for neither were a large number of
Englishmen at home,—but that, by virtue of the effects of distance, the
central government was external to the colonists, in a sense in which it
never was to the unrepresented Englishmen in England itself. It is
difficult to see how any system of representation could have been
devised which would have improved the position of the colonies, although
representation in the English Parliament was proposed by Barbadoes as
early as 1652.[758] There was, in fact, no original thought contributed
by any of the colonies, which was of practical use in devising any
better scheme of imperial control than that which England was gradually
evolving. During the formative period, the colonies offered nothing of a
constructive character to the solution of the problem, and contented
themselves with a purely obstructionist attitude of attempting to ignore
or oppose any measure which they deemed in conflict with their local
interests.
Footnote 758:
_Cal. State Pap., Col., 1574-1660_, p. 373. _Cf._ _The Groans of the
Plantations_ (London, 1689), pp. 15 _f._, 23 _f._
At more than one period, English colonists have been accused of
believing that “it is the undoubted right of every Englishman to settle
where he likes, to behave as he sees fit, and to call upon the
Mother-Country to foot the bill.”[759] This, however, is not merely a
colonial characteristic: it is the spirit developed upon every frontier,
as the later history of American westward expansion may be called upon
to illustrate; and, as we have pointed out, the whole chain of colonies
formed the long encircling frontier of England. The spirit of stubborn
resistance to any interference with their legal rights, or even with
their mere freedom of action, was quite as often found in the
island-colonies of both France and England as it was in the continental
ones now included in the United States. The residents of Barbadoes, for
example, in a memorial condemning the Navigation Act of 1651, used
language which has a ring that has often been considered peculiarly
American. After denying that Parliament had any jurisdiction over them,
because they were unrepresented, the settlers went on to say that, if
they could not obtain a peaceful settlement of the dispute, yet “wee
will not alienate ourselves from those old heroick virtues of true
Englishmen to prostitute our freedom and privileges to which we are
borne to the will and opinion of any one; neither do wee think our
number so contemptible, nor our resolution so weake as to be forced or
perswaded to so ignoble a submission, and we cannot think that there are
any amongst us who are soe simple and soe unworthily minded, that they
would not rather chuse a noble death than forsake their ould liberties
and privileges.”[760]
Footnote 759:
_Acts Privy Council, Colonial, 1613-1680_, p. xxix.
Footnote 760:
R. H. Schomburgk, _History of Barbadoes_ (London, 1848), pp. 706 _ff._
_Cf._, for a similar spirit in Bermuda, Beer, _Old Colonial System_,
vol. II, p. 99.
In spite of the nobility of the sentiment, however, the position
assumed, as was frequently the case in Massachusetts, was in fact
unwarranted from a strictly legal point of view. Had the stand taken by
England on important points in the long colonial controversy been indeed
illegal, the problem would have been enormously simplified. As a matter
of fact, it was rather the contentions of the colonists which were, from
the strict technical standpoint, the illegal ones.[761] But the real
questions were not questions of law, although, with the instincts of
their race, the Englishmen on both sides of the water fought them out as
if they were. One might as well have passed laws to forbid a boy
outgrowing his clothes, as to forbid rapidly developing and
far-separated colonies from outgrowing the doctrine of a centralized
imperial sovereignty. This fact, which is now wholly admitted by the
most patriotic Englishmen, both at home and in the dominions, was
unfortunately beyond the ken of seventeenth-century thought.
Footnote 761:
_Cf._ McIlwain, _High Court of Parliament_, pp. 364 _ff._
The attitude of the most powerful colony in New England had been
foreshadowed from the very beginning. The transfer of the Massachusetts
charter to the colony itself had obviously been for the purpose of
escaping as far as possible from the jurisdiction of the English courts,
and establishing a virtually independent government, under a strained
construction of that document. We have already seen how the colony had
arrogated to itself sovereign powers, how it had over and over refused
appeals to the home courts and Crown, how it had erected fortifications,
and taken other military measures to resist by force the assertion of
her authority by England, and how it had made treaties of both war and
peace with foreign powers. In 1652, it established a mint, the coins
having the famous device of the pine tree and the word “Massachusetts”
on one side, and “New England” and the date on the other, but with no
recognition of the king.[762] Even the mere oath of allegiance was
refused whenever possible, although required by the charter itself.[763]
All of these acts represented a consistent policy, openly avowed among
themselves by the leaders, of disputing any claims of the home country
to any authority whatsoever over the colony.
Footnote 762:
_Massachusetts Records_, vol. IV, pt. i, pp. 84, 104. The right to
coin money was occasionally granted in the early charters, but not in
that of Massachusetts.
Footnote 763:
_Cf._ the form of oath in _Massachusetts Records_, vol. IV, pt. ii, p.
201. In 1665, under pressure from the Royal Commission, the General
Court agreed that it would “order the taking of the oath of
allegeance, according as the charter comands.” _Ibid._, p. 206.
From time to time, crises in its affairs brought out official
declarations of its attitude. Owing to the exigencies of the Civil War
in England, Parliament had issued commissions to certain officers of the
merchant marine, authorizing them to make prizes of any vessels which
they might find in the royal service. In the summer of 1644, one of
these officers, a Captain Stagg, appeared in an armed ship in Boston
harbor, and there made prize of a Bristol ship, according to his orders.
A tumult was raised, and many of the magistrates and clergy, asserting
that “the people's liberties” had been violated, were in favor of
forcing the release of the seized vessel. A majority, however, decided
that the Parliament's commission must be recognized; for, if its
authority were denied in this, then the foundation of the colony's
patent also would be denied, and if they relied solely upon their Indian
purchases to give them title to the country, they would have to renounce
“England's protection, which were a great weakness in us, seing their
care hath been to strengthen our liberties and not overthrow them”; and,
also, if they should by opposing the Parliament “cause them to forsake
us, we could have no protection or countenance from any, but should lie
open as a prey to all men.” The way for resistance at any time, however,
was left open by declaring that, by the course of affairs in England,
the Parliament had taught that “_salus populi_ is _suprema lex_” and
that, in case that body should ever prove of a “malignant spirit,” “we
may make use of _salus populi_ to withstand any authority from thence to
our hurt.” During the discussion, some had maintained that by their
patent the colony was subject “to no other power but among ourselves”;
but that was denied.[764]
Footnote 764:
J. Winthrop, _History_, vol. II, p. 223 _f._
Two years later, however, in connection with the Dr. Child petition, and
the order of the English Commissioners concerning Samuel Gorton, the
local aspects of which have been discussed in a previous chapter, the
General Court undertook to define the colony's relations to England more
definitely. While there was some difference of opinion, the majority of
the magistrates and of the clergy consulted took the stand that by the
charter they had “absolute power of government,” with authority to “make
laws, to erect all sorts of magistracy, to correct, punish, pardon,
govern, and rule the people absolutely,” without the interposition of
any superior power. They denied that any appeal lay against any of their
proceedings, or that they were bound, “further than in a way of
justification,” to make answer to any complaints against them in
England. They drew a distinction between corporations within England and
those without, asserted that plantations were above the rank of ordinary
corporations, and added that “our allegiance binds us not to the laws of
England any longer than while we live in England, for the laws of the
parliament of England reach no further, nor do the King's writs under
the great seal.” They did, indeed, acknowledge some sort of shadowy and
undefined allegiance, and claimed protection by the mother-country as a
right.[765]
Footnote 765:
J. Winthrop, _History_, vol. II, pp. 341, 345, 354, _f._, 352.
This theory of virtual independence was reasserted by the Court in the
year following the Restoration, with the addition that they conceived
that “any imposition prejudicial to the country, contrary to any just
law” not repugnant to the laws of England, was an infringement of their
rights, and that the colony was privileged to defend itself, even by
force of arms, against any who should attempt its “destruction,
invasion, detriment or annoyance.”[766] The duties of allegiance were
defined somewhat more exactly than they had been fifteen years earlier,
and somewhat differently; but any sovereign rights of the English
government over its dependencies in the Empire were denied.[767] More
and more, not merely in theory, but in the form that the colony's
negotiations took with the home authorities through its agents, it was
endeavoring to assume the position, not of an integral part of an
empire, but of an allied sovereign power.
Footnote 766:
_Massachusetts Records_, vol. IV, pt. ii, p. 25.
Footnote 767:
Kaye, _English Colonial Administration under Clarendon_, p. 142.
The attitude of Massachusetts has been noted because her position was
far more pronouncedly anti-English than was that of her sister colonies
in the group. Not only were the governments of Plymouth, Rhode Island,
and Connecticut more democratic than that of Massachusetts, but the
individual citizens of those plantations were quite as tenacious of
their individual rights. Nevertheless, there was a much less aggressive
tone in their relations with the mother-country, and a greater readiness
to acknowledge imperial obligations in return for imperial benefits. As
we have seen, however, the frontier-spirit was at work throughout the
entire range of empire; and, while probably, neither at that time, nor
at any period down to the formation of the union, was the anti-English
element in Massachusetts as large as used to be thought, nevertheless it
was the radical, and not the loyal and conservative element, which
mainly determined her policy, and, gradually, that of New England.
If we wish to apportion fairly the praise and blame due to individuals
and peoples in history,—if indeed it is ever possible to do so,—we must
endeavor to look at their actions from a purely contemporary point of
view, and to ignore long-subsequent results. The modern historian has
come to realize that the qualities of a people, the characteristics of
an epoch, the motives of a great struggle or movement, are by no means
the clear-cut, sharply defined matters sketched by the patriotic writers
of a simpler day. In the enormously complicated development of modern
society from the struggle of class with class, the conflict of interest
with interest, the clash of one element against another, it is
recognized that the contest was at no time between clearly aligned
forces of the powers of darkness and the powers of light. “It is
beginning to be seen,” writes Professor McIlwain, speaking of the early
constitutional struggle at the time of de Montfort, “that men in the
past have really advanced the cause of liberty, though often entirely
unconscious of any such intention, or even when their aims were entirely
selfish.”[768]
Footnote 768:
McIlwain, _High Court of Parliament_, pp. 12 _ff._
The resistance to England by her colonies in the past, on many occasions
and from many quarters, has undoubtedly advanced the cause of liberty
throughout the entire Anglo-Saxon race. The statesmen of England in the
seventeenth century, however, were confronted, as statesmen usually are,
by a practical problem, to be solved in the light of contemporary
knowledge, practices, and beliefs. As we have already noted, neither
Massachusetts, Barbadoes, Bermuda, nor any other of the colonies engaged
in defying and obstructing the attempts of England to unify and govern
the Empire, had any practicable suggestion to offer. They could not be
allowed by England to become independent without running the risk of
their being absorbed by her rivals, France or Spain. Nor did the
colonies themselves wish to lose her protection. Much as they might talk
of armed resistance, the wisest men in them knew that they could not
subsist alone, and preferred the rule of England to that of any of the
other empires. The letter from Pynchon, quoted in an earlier chapter,
the words of Winthrop cited above, as well as other contemporary
evidence, show that the colonists realized and counted upon the power of
England to shield them, so that they should not, as Winthrop said, “lie
open as a prey to all men.”
If England is to be condemned for interpreting the law, which was
indubitably on her side, in too narrow a spirit, and of caring too much
for her own interests in building up those of the Empire, on the other
hand it is difficult to acquit the colonies of a selfishness almost as
great, in their attempts to secure all the advantages of empire, without
being hampered by its restrictions. They insisted, for example, upon
protection as a right, at the very time that they were flouting the
Navigation laws designed to foster that naval strength upon which alone
such protection could be based.
Although the thought of England was constructive in reference to the
Empire, and that of the colonies was destructive, nevertheless
contemporary imperialism was destined to be influenced quite as much by
colonial fact as by English theory. There was much in the imperial
scheme that the colonist, from his isolated position and limited
outlook, failed to see, just as there was much which, because of its
conflict with his individual interest, he refused to accept. But the
facts that failed to fit into the theory were far more obvious to him
than to the Englishman at home. The slower movement of the historical
process in the old world made it more difficult for the Englishman at
the centre of empire to foresee its future; while, owing to the swifter
course of evolution on the periphery of the system, and the
simplifications of the frontier, the colonist was to a great extent
already living in that future without thinking about it at all.
His interests, however, soon became wholly colonial and extremely
provincial, and his political thought became entirely centred upon his
local government, the development of which grew more and more absorbing
in proportion as its political dependence was diminished. But the real
problem of the day was not a domestic one for the several colonies,
profound as were the results to ensue from the development of the local
New England political institutions. The real problem was, how to bring
these local institutions into working relations with the still necessary
sovereign power at the centre of the system. The colonists might offer
legal objections or armed resistance, in the way of criticism, but so
long as they offered no help in devising a workable solution of the
problem, the obligation to do so devolved upon England alone. The rapid
material success of the colonists, their new surroundings, their
isolation, their necessary self-reliance, and their new local pride,
were all developing, not, indeed, new thought, but new feeling. Although
the empire evolved from the Mercantile Theory was a necessary step in
the evolution of the empire of to-day, the Englishman's thought and the
colonists' feelings were bound to clash over it, for the differences
went far deeper than mere economic interests. The problem of composing
those differences, great as it may have seemed to the contemporary
rulers in Europe, or to the protesting settler on every frontier, were
in reality far greater, even, than either of them dreamed. Moreover,
difficult as the question would have been in any case, it had been
rendered far more so by the disorganization of authority at home in the
constitutional struggle. With the return of settled conditions at the
Restoration of the monarchy in England, it seemed as if a serious
attempt were at last to be made to bring order out of the increasing
chaos of the imperial situation. Unfortunately, the combined weakness
and tyranny of the restored Stuarts served to postpone, until after that
dynasty's second dethronement, the success of any efforts to evolve and
apply a considered and consistent colonial policy.