The American Founding: Conciliation with the Colonies Declaration

Conciliation with the Colonies Declaration

Edmund Burke

1771

In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole:  and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for.  This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies, probably, than in any other people of the earth; and this from a great variety of powerful causes; which, to understand the true temper of their minds, and the direction which this spirit takes, it will not be amiss to lay open somewhat more largely.

First, the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen.  England, Sir, is a nation, which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her freedom.  The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands.  They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles.  Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.  Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed itself some favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness.  It happened, you know, Sir, that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing.  Most of the contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates, or on the balance among the several orders of the state.  The question of money was not with them so immediate.  But in England it was otherwise.  On this point of taxes the ablest pens and most eloquent tongues have been exercised, the greatest spirits have acted and suffered.  In order to give the fullest satisfaction concerning the importance of this point, it was not only necessary for those who in argument defended the excellence of the English Constitution to insist on this privilege of granting money as a dry point of fact, and to prove that the right had been acknowledged in ancient parchments and blind usages to reside in a certain body called a House of Commons:  they went much further;:  they attempted to prove, and they succeeded, that in theory it ought to be so, from the particular nature of a House of Commons, as an immediate representative of the people, whether the old records had delivered this oracle or not.  They took infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people must in effect themselves, mediately or immediately, possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty could subsist.  The colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, these ideas and principles.  Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing.  Liberty might be safe or might be endangered in twenty other particulars without their being much pleased or alarmed.  Here they felt its pulse; and as they found that beat, they thought themselves sick or sound.  I do not say whether they were right or wrong in applying your general arguments to their own case.  It is not easy, indeed, to make a monopoly of theorems and corollaries.  The fact is, that they did thus apply those general arguments; and your mode of governing them, whether through lenity or indolence, through wisdom or mistake, confirmed them in the imagination, that they, as well as you, had an interest in these common principles.

They were further confirmed in this pleasing error by the form of their provincial legislative assemblies.  Their governments are popular in a high degree:  some are merely popular; in all, the popular representative is the most weighty; and this share of the people in their ordinary government never fails to inspire them with lofty sentiments, and with a strong aversion from whatever tends to deprive them of their chief importance.

If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of government, religion would have given it a complete effect.  Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit.  The people are Protestants, and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.  This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it.  I do not think, Sir, that the reason of this averseness in the dissenting churches from all that looks like absolute government is so much to be sought in their religious tenets as in their history.  Every one knows that the Roman Catholic religion is at least coeval with most of the governments where it prevails, that it has generally gone hand in hand with them, and received great favor and every kind of support from authority.  The Church of England, too, was formed from her cradle under the nursing care of regular government.  But the dissenting interests have sprung up in direct opposition to all the ordinary powers of the world, and could justify that opposition only on a strong claim to natural liberty.  Their very existence depended on the powerful and unremitted assertion of that claim.  All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent.  But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.  This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in most of the northern provinces, where the Church of England, notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private sect, not composing, most probably, the tenth of the people.  The colonists left England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrant  was the highest of all; and even that stream of foreigners which has been constantly flowing into these colonies has, for the greatest part, been composed of dissenters from the establishments of their several countries, and have brought with them a temper and character far from alien to that of the people with whom they mixed.

Sir, I can perceive, by their manner, that some gentlemen object to the latitude of this description, because in the southern colonies the Church of England forms a large body, and has a regular establishment.  It is certainly true.  There is, however, a circumstance attending these colonies, which, in my opinion, fully counterbalances this difference, and makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than in those to the northward.  It is, that in Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves.  Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.  Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege.  Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing, and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude, liberty looks, amongst them, like something that is more noble and liberal.  I do not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in it; but I cannot alter the nature of man.  The fact is so; and these people of the southern colonies are much more strongly, and with a higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty, than those to the northward.  Such were all the ancient commonwealths; such were our Gothic ancestors; such in our days were the Poles; and such will be all the masters of slaves, who are not slaves themselves.  In such a people, the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.

Permit me, Sir, to add another circumstance in our colonies, which contributes no mean part towards the growth and effect of this untractable spirit:  I mean their education.  In no country, perhaps, in the world is the law so general a study.  The profession itself is numerous and powerful, and in most provinces it takes the lead.  The greater number of the deputies sent to the Congress were lawyers.  But all who read, and most do read, endeavor to obtain some smattering in that science.  I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the plantations.  The colonists have now fallen into the way of printing them for their own use.  I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's "Commentaries” in America as in England.  General Gage marks out this disposition very particularly in a letter on your table.  He states, that all the people in his government are lawyers, or smatterers in law,––and that in Boston they have been enabled, by successful chicane, wholly to evade many parts on one of your capital penal constitutions.  The smartness of debate will say, that this knowledge ought to teach them more clearly the rights of legislature, their obligations to obedience, and the penalties of rebellion.  All this is mighty well.  But my honorable and learned friend on the floor, who condescends to mark what I say for animadversion, will disdain that ground.  He has heard, as well as I, that, when great honors and great emoluments do not win over this knowledge to the service of the state, it is a formidable adversary to government.  If the spirit be not tamed and broken by these happy methods, it is stubborn and litigious.  Abeunt studia in mores.  This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources.  In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle.  They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

The last cause of this disobedient spirit in the colonies is hardly less powerful than the rest, as it is not merely moral, but laid deep in the natural constitution of things.  Three thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them. No contrivance can prevent the effect of this distance in weakening government.  Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution; and the want of a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat an whole system.  You have, indeed, winged ministers of vengeance, who carry your bolts in their pounces to the remotest verge of the sea:  but there a power steps in, that limits the arrogance of raging passions and furious elements, and says, "So far shalt thou go, and no farther.”  Who are you, that should fret and rage, and bite the chains of Nature?  Nothing worse happens to you than does to all nations who have extensive empire; and it happens in all the forms into which empire can be thrown.  In large bodies, the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities.  Nature has said it.  The Turk cannot govern Egypt, and Arabia, and Kurdistan, as he governs Thrace; nor has he the same dominion in Crimea and Algiers which he has at Brusa and Smyrna.  Despotism itself is obliged to truck and huckster.  The Sultan gets such obedience as he can.  He governs with a loose rein, that he may govern at all; and the whole of the force and vigor of his authority in his centre is derived from a prudent relaxation in all his borders.  Spain, in her provinces, is perhaps not so well obeyed as you are in yours.  She complies, too; she submits; she watches times.  This is the immutable condition, the eternal law, of extensive and detached empire.

Then, Sir, from these six capital sources, of descent, of form of government, of religion in the northern provinces, of manners in the southern, of education, of the remoteness of situation from the first mover of government,––from all these causes a fierce spirit of liberty has grown up.  It has grown with the growth of the people in your colonies, and increased with the increase of their wealth:  a spirit, that, unhappily meeting with an exercise of power in England, which, however lawful, is not reconcilable to any ideas of liberty, much less with theirs, has kindled this flame that is ready to consume us.