HUME ON THE INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE 629 assurance of British supremacy in their "distinctness and independency of one another", and the official policy of centralisation was consequently held in suspicion, since it might result in a “general discontent all at once throughout all" the colonies. The strength of this sentiment became most apparent after the American question was raised, and the following quotation sounded a note echoed in many pamphlets on the British side: "Our greatest security and power over them must consist in their disunion...we should rather make them rivals for our favour, than united friends in opposing us".1 Such utterances can be countered by those of other writers with a truer vision, but they undoubtedly expressed a section of opinion. The liberal concessions advocated by this essayist must be further discounted; they were all conditional on colonial commercial subordination. His interest in the Empire lay in the fact that "whatever is in any way got by the colonists there, does finally centre here in the superior or mother country". The sheet anchor of the Empire consisted of "our Act of Navigation, whereby they are obliged to traffick wholly with us; so that all their superfluous wealth, gained by the industrious, dissipated again by the luxurious, terminates here in the purchase of our costly manufactures". The apparent generosity of this writer, then, was fed on strictly business and selfish motives. Colonial loyalty was but a species of investment, not so safe, however, as colonial disunion. More liberal in character were the views expressed by David Hume in his Essays. He was not inspired by the reverential regard for the Glorious Revolution which characterised the earlier writers of the century, and he broke away from the static method of treating history in his recognition that it was "on opinion only that government is founded",2 and that opinion was in a state of perpetual flux through "the progress of learning and of liberty". In his exposure of unhistorical abstractions and in his respect for expediency he was the forerunner of Burke, and in his plea for the abolition of restrictions on trade he prepared the ground for Adam Smith. But while the general views of Hume manifested a real grasp of historical method, he was sometimes betrayed into rash conclusions. Thus in his essay Of National Characters (1742) he rejected the doctrine of Montesquieu that "the empire of the climate is the first, the most powerful of all empires", and sought to demonstrate that men did not "owe anything of their temper or genius to the air, food, or climate". This rejection of the theory of the eminent French thinker is particularly noteworthy, because the difficulty of adjusting relations between the mother country and the colonies was very greatly increased by the differences that had developed between the American character and that of England. When a cool and dispassionate 1 Scots Magazine (1765), xxvi, 636–8. 2 Hume, D., Essays and Treatises (1788), 1, 37. * Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, Bk. xvп (ed. of 1793), 1, 334. Hume, D., op. cit. 1, 179. 4 thinker like Hume failed to discern the rise of a new nation, it is not surprising that most of his countrymen were equally at fault. Meanwhile an imperial consciousness was being fostered in Britain by the challenge of France, and the shifting of interest from the West Indies to the Hudson, which war involved, brought into greater prominence the hitherto neglected northern continental colonies. Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts had long been uneasily aware of the military weakness occasioned by the lack of co-operation among the British colonies which threatened to be fatal in face of the centralised power wielded by the Governor of New France, and his persistent advocacy of a plan of union for purposes of defence was responsible for the conference which with the approval of Lord Halifax assembled at Albany in 1754 and for making the subject of colonial union the most important issue before it. The scheme which was discussed and approved by the conference was the work of Benjamin Franklin. The colonies, however, objected to it on the ground that it infringed too much on their liberties, and Shirley disliked it because "the Prerogative is so much relaxed in the Albany Plan, that it doth not appear well calculated to strengthen the dependency of the Colonies upon the Crown, which seems a very important Article in the consideration of this Affair". Shirley proposed to keep the colonies in dependence by debarring them from any voice in the choice of the Grand Council and by taxing the colonies through the British Parliament. These suggestions were submitted to Franklin who at once took exception to them on the score that they violated the principle of "No taxation without representation". Though the colonies may be fairly criticised for having by their jealousies defeated a measure which was widely admitted to be an urgent reform, it is tolerably certain that a plan which failed to secure the approval of Franklin, who was a friend of union, would have excited active discontent throughout America at a time when the Government could not afford to sacrifice the goodwill of the colonies. Apart from the question of union the facts of the situation caused political and territorial problems to assume pre-eminence over mere matters of commerce, for in the course of the Seven Years' War British statesmen found themselves confronted with issues wherein the simple tenets of the mercantilists offered them no adequate guidance. Consequently the war closed amid an atmosphere of disturbing potentialities; for the Peace of Paris, by providing for the retention of Canada and the Ohio basin in preference to the French West Indian islands, marked the first serious departure of the British Government from the principles of the politico-economic school which had hitherto dominated colonial administration, and the assumption of a genuinely imperial policy. 1 Shirley, W., Correspondence (ed. Lincoln), 11, 96, 111-16; Franklin, B., Works, ш, 57–68. THE AMERICAN QUESTION 631 Nation-building, however, predicated an idea for which the nation was as yet hardly prepared. It is true, as is shown elsewhere, that the so-called mercantile system existed rather as a doctrine than as a matter of practice, yet the nature of the pamphlets poured out from 1755 onwards testifies to the bondage of the national mind to commercial motives, and while there can be no question that there was a genuine national interest in the Empire, it was too much inspired by considerations of the convenience of the mother country. Time as well as knowledge was needed for the blossoming of a wider and more sympathetic feeling, and in the middle of the eighteenth century there were few qualified to follow Pitt. Among these few was Thomas Pownall who had captured something of the splendour of the true imperial idea. His plea for the application of the mercantile system on an imperial instead of a national basis by the development of a "grand marine dominion" was the fruit of a sentiment of imperial patriotism, which for him was lord and sovereign over every other consideration. The sentiment was one in which many Britons and colonists were lacking, but it was capable of being inspired by such a personality as Pitt's. During the critical years following the passing of the Stamp Act Pownall was quick to catch the first murmurs of the rising tide of American nationalism and he was anxious to keep the new American nation within the British Empire.1 The colonial protests evoked by the Stamp Act were a warning that the colonial system was in need of overhauling, and in 1765 Governor Bernard wrote to Lord Barrington that all the political evils in America arose "from the Want of Ascertaining the Relation between Great Britain and the American Colonies".2 The American question formed, in truth, the strongest possible test of the capacity of the British constitution to fulfil an imperial as well as a national function. In such a crisis, when at last the facts of the situation were being laid bare and analysed, everything depended on the manner in which the question was approached. Nothing could have been more disastrous for the Empire than that legalism should have taken the prominent place it did in the dispute. Prior to 1763 the colonies had not denied the right of the British Parliament to legislate for them, but that was because up to that time the function of Parliament in colonial matters had been regulative rather than administrative. The Stamp Act, however, seemed to foreshadow the more active and sustained intervention of Parliament in their internal affairs, and the colonists, thoroughly alarmed, attacked the measure as unconstitutional. The controversy revealed a wide cleavage of idea between the Americans and the people of Britain. 1 Pownall, T., Administration of the Colonies (1774), pt II, pp. 84-6. 2 Bernard, F., op. cit. pp. 32-3. 3 Osgood, H. L., The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, m, 12. The omni-competence of Parliament was now accepted by Englishmen as the salient feature of the constitution. They had come to realise that the constitution, in the words of Lord Mansfield, "has always been in a moving state, either gaining or losing something"," an idea which would have seemed as preposterous to most Englishmen a generation back as it did to the Americans, whose view was summed up in a sentence by Samuel Adams: "In all free states the constitution is fixed". Similarly the concepts of natural law and the contractual theory of government, which formed the chief dialectic weapons of the Americans, had become for most Englishmen exploded superstitions to which they could hardly listen with patience. It was, therefore, difficult to find a plane where the disputants could meet without misunderstanding each other's position. Once the controversy was suffered to topple into the mire of legalism, the last no less than the first refuge of the narrow-minded, then the issue seemed in British eyes to whittle down to one of right. What were the powers of Parliament? In such guise the issue assumed a form particularly congenial to minds insensitive to the pressure of facts and the solicitation of new ideas. To such, all that was necessary was to obtain the most authoritative legal opinion. This line, which was followed in many pamphlets, was little calculated to assuage political passions, in the atmosphere of which the shafts of Samuel Adams, feathered by the determination to extort independence, could be discharged with most telling effect. It was a foregone conclusion that legal opinion would be overwhelmingly in favour of the claims of Parliament. Juridically there had been no advance in the status of the colonies since the seventeenth century, and Lord Mansfield's dictum that the American governments were "all on the same footing as our great corporations in London" was according to the letter of the law. Among British jurists the only one of eminence to befriend the American cause was Lord Camden, who took up the position, unsupported by history or jurisprudence, that the constitution was "grounded on the eternal and immutable laws of nature". This legal definition naturally resulted from the constitutional points raised in the course of the debates on the repeal of the Stamp Act, and need not have been dangerous had the relation of the constitutional issue to the demands of imperial unity been kept in mind. There developed, however, an unfortunate tendency in Great Britain to base all claims on what the law allowed without sufficiently examining the extent to which legal definition accurately interpreted the realities of the situation. Possibly the influence of Sir William Blackstone contributed to fix British attention too closely on what were deemed to be legal rights at the expense of what was expedient. His lectures at Oxford, which in their published form as Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) were widely read in Great 1 Parl. Hist. XVI, 197. • Ibid. XVI, 178. INFLUENCE OF BLACKSTONE 633 Britain and America, had revived interest in the study of English law. He supported in the most explicit terms the omni-competence of Parliament: "What Parliament doth no authority upon earth can undo".1 It would be unjust to charge Blackstone with being hostile to reform-in fact, his exposition prepared the ground for the legal reforms that were accomplished in the nineteenth century-but he expressed such satisfaction with the constitution as to convey the impression that it required no amendment, and so confirmed the minds of his readers in the legalistic habits of thought that were politically so disastrous. 1 Blackstone, W., Commentaries on the Laws of England (ed. of 1773), 1, 161. |