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Spain by Flanders, others to Savoy or Naples, that the West Indies should never come into their heads".1

Davenant, Paterson and John Law of Lauriston were the most liberal representatives of the school which emphasised the association of trade with politics. If under Law's magnificently conceived system commerce was to be at once the chief aim and principal prop of the State, it was at the same time intended to be the handmaid of the interests of the people. The views of such men, however, were probably less representative of the opinion of the mass of the people than those of such rigid mercantilists as Sir Josiah Child, John Cary and Sir William Petty, who had no sympathy whatever with the idea of colonisation as a process of nation-building and wished to confine Plantations to the tropical and semi-tropical regions of the earth.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century new ideas began to permeate the mercantile system. The craze for stock-jobbing, of which Law's Mississippi scheme and the South Sea Company were the most conspicuous examples, was an indication of changing economic ideas. Land was no longer esteemed as the only source of wealth, and the development of commerce brought into prominence a new class of men who were despised by the landed gentry as upstarts. The domination of commerce was accompanied by a lowering of moral standards, which roused the terrible wrath of Swift against all stock-jobbers. The most influential writer on the Tory side, he yet stood above all parties, so that his judgments are personal rather than partisan. Particularly he resented the aggressiveness of the commercial spirit and the cunning of the Whigs in associating themselves peculiarly with the Protestant succession. "We have carried on wars", he wrote, "that we might fill the pockets of stock-jobbers. We have revised our Constitution, and by a great and national effort have secured our Protestant succession, only that we may become the tools of a faction who arrogate to themselves the whole merit of what was a national act." Stock-jobbers he detested as men "who find their profit in our woes", and he believed that the Whigs were hostile to the landed interest. The influence of the commercial element on government he regarded as deplorable, since under its inspiration men came "with the spirit of shopkeepers to frame rules for the administration of kingdoms". He deprecated the tendency of the age to send every living soul either into "the warehouse or the workhouse". Government, he warned his countrymen, consisted of something more than "the importation of nutmegs and the curing of herrings".

The trend of constitutional development, with its diminution of the power of the monarch, was little to his taste, and it was his constant plea to bring back the constitution to "the old form”. But

1 Swift, J., Works, ed. Scott, W., v, 28.

SWIFT ON COLONISATION

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though his view of history was static, he recognised that Magna Carta was not indefeasible but might be changed by Act of Parliament. The position of the colonies under the constitution he never discussed, but like the majority of his countrymen he probably regarded them as mere possessions. If he had had the power, he would have installed the Anglican Church in a more prominent position in the colonies, and it was one of his complaints against the War of the Spanish Succession that it prevented Queen Anne from extending her care of religion to her American Plantations. Swift was an imperialist in the sense that he recognised the need of Great Britain to plant colonies, but he stripped colonisation of its veil of humanitarianism and exposed the sordid motives and brutality with which it was accompanied. Literature contains no more stinging description of the founding of a modern colony than that given in the last chapter of Gulliver's Travels. "A crew of pirates are driven by a storm, they know not whither; at length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and plunder; they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank or a stone for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more by force for a sample, return home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion, acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free licence given to all acts of inhumanity and lust; the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers employed in so pious an expedition is a modern colony sent to convert and civilise an idolatrous and barbarous people." At a time when material considerations were in the ascendant there was little of exaggeration in such an indict

ment.

Swift's contempt of traders predisposed him against the mercantile system, and his own experience in Ireland of the working of that system made him irrevocably hostile to it. The ruin of the Irish woollen industry in the interests of Britain aroused his bitter animosity, and in a pamphlet published in 17202 he recommended the Irish people to retaliate on the restrictions on their commerce by a policy of non-importation, a device which was later adopted with some success by the American colonists. He supported Molyneux in his claim that the Irish Parliament possessed the full and sole competence to legislate for Ireland, and the general line he took in opposing British domination was substantially the same as that adopted by the Americans after the passing of the Stamp Act. Thus his advice to the Irish people to use only Irish goods anticipated a 1 Swift, J., Works, ed. Scott, W., xпI, 378–9.

2 A Modest Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures, 1720.

policy actually carried out by the Americans. Had he been aware of the parallel between Ireland and the American colonies, he would presumably have claimed for the latter what he did for the former. It is at any rate significant that British regulation of Irish affairs drove him to assume the position that the only link between Britain and the country of his birth was provided by the Crown.

The accession of George I ushered in the era of Walpole with its motif of quieta non movere. It was a period of political stagnation during which the one positive contribution to the national welfare was the enrichment of the kingdom as the result of the peace policy of the great minister. The increasing opulence of the nation and the absence of vital domestic issues hastened the lowering of standards which had begun with the Restoration. Corruption in politics was paralleled by spiritual dyspepsia in the sphere of religion, but as is not uncommon with such periods stagnation bred a complacency which accepted the existing order of things as entirely admirable. Thus the British constitution was extolled as the model of what a constitution should be. The prevalent idea was that it had been fixed for all time, and the pious wish expressed later by George III that the British constitution would continue "unimpaired to the latest posterity as a proof of the wisdom of the nation" simply reflected the views of the great majority of his subjects. A static attitude, in fact, characterised the national outlook in every direction. There was no advance in the national conception of the colonies. For though the Journals of the Lords and Commons furnish ample proof of a deep and sustained interest in them, it is plain that this interest was nurtured on commercial, not imperial motives. The comparatively liberal ideas of Tory writers and economists such as Defoe and Davenant with regard to trade in general, which found expression in the abortive attempt of the Tory statesmen, Oxford and Bolingbroke, to arrange a commercial treaty with France on free-trade principles, were repugnant to the merchant class as a whole and to the Whigs who, under Walpole, directed the fortunes of the nation. The extent to which commerce aspired to sway national policy may be discerned in the Whig exposition of principles as contained in the British Merchant and the writings of Joshua Gee. The ideas therein laid down are those of the mercantile system as it had been formulated in the time of Charles II, a theory of trade which was alike hostile to commercial dealings with France and unfavourable to our northern colonies in America. Gee was anxious that the Acts of Trade should be administered with the utmost rigour and, realising how similar were the positions of Ireland and the colonies in the British commercial system, suggested that this end could be most quickly attained by applying the principle of Poynings's Law to the colonies. Similarly there was no advance in 1 Earl Stanhope, Life of William Pitt, 11, xviii.

2 Gee, J., Trade and Navigation of Great Britain considered (2nd ed., 1730), p. 108.

THE CRAFTSMAN ON COLONIAL APPOINTMENTS 625

the legal estimate of the colonies which were still denied the status of political communities, though most of these possessed Assemblies, many of which had absorbed powers that were supposed to be exercised by the governors alone.

Nevertheless, despite the prevailing fixity of view at the beginning of the Hanoverian régime, important changes in the form and spirit of the constitution were gradually unfolding themselves, though there were few who recognised that the constitution was in a state of perennial flux. Since 1714 the independence of the Crown in political action had come to an end, a result hastened by George I's ignorance of the English language, and the system of Cabinet development was in process. The importance of these changes was soon to be obvious in colonial affairs. Until 1714 the executive had been the chief agency of British control in the colonies, and its efforts to effect a reduction in the number of governments in America had frequently been thwarted by the refusal of Parliament to sanction in the colonies the extension of a power which it was diminishing in England. But this frustration of English action in the Plantations continued only until Parliament had assured its complete control over the Crown in every field, when it as resolutely denied the claims of the colonists to liberties which challenged its own omni-competence. Against the invasions of the Crown up to the middle of the eighteenth century the colonies could often count on the effective aid of the Legislature; but when American liberties were menaced by Parliament itself there was no power above it to which appeal could be made.

Of these vital changes in form and spirit which were taking place the nation was but dimly aware, and even a man like Bolingbroke scarcely appreciated their significance. Debarred by the Whigs from a parliamentary career, he used his pen through the medium of the Craftsman for the purpose of bringing about the downfall of Walpole, whom he accused of usurping the functions of the Crown. With masterly skill he seized on the opening for attack presented by the organised corruption with the help of which Walpole consolidated his position. The subject of colonial appointments was the theme of some of the most stirring articles of the Craftsman. The people sent "to king it abroad" were selected for the most scandalous reasons. "One was an excellent buffoon", another had distinguished himself "in the profession of pimping", and "few of these gaunt and hungry Vicegerents set out with a purpose to learn the language or to consult the interest of the Plantations they are sent to govern". It was common talk that many colonial appointments were bought by people who could only reimburse themselves "by fleecing the people whom they are sent to cherish and protect". Never was a time when such protests were more necessary, for corrupt practices had come almost to be accepted as part and parcel of political life. Colonial appointments continued to be given to unsuitable persons, and Junius

CHBE I

40

could exclaim without straining the truth: "It was not Virginia that wanted a Governor, but a court favourite that wanted the salary”.1 The jealous exclusion of Tories from political power naturally evoked indignant protests from Bolingbroke, who showed that by the time of George II the differences between the Whigs and Tories were only make-believe. Party had degenerated into faction, so that politics had become merely a contest between the "ins" and the ‘outs", a struggle for office rather than for principles. Seeking to disparage the idea of a first minister, he stigmatised party as a corroding element in the constitution. The great need of the country was a patriot king who, dedicated to the service of the nation, would select his ministers irrespective of party. Bolingbroke did not realise that he had planned for his patriot king two incompatible rôles, that of monarch and that of chief minister, and the disastrous attempt of George III to establish his system, though in a distorted fashion, exposed the danger as well as the impracticability of Bolingbroke's teaching. The King in his determination to govern as well as reign could meet Bolingbroke's appeal to rise above party only by organising a more sinister party of his own, and the turmoil which his intrigues excited caused the American question for a time to become subordinate to domestic politics. The influence of Bolingbroke, in so far as it was responsible for encouraging George III to seek to control the machinery of parliamentary corruption and to destroy all sense of collective responsibility in his ministers, proved a most unhappy one for his country, which, in the stir provoked by the manœuvres of the monarch, was diverted from paying the close attention they deserved to the vital questions that followed the conclusion of the Seven Years' War. His conception of history was entirely a static one, and his reflections being neither deep nor original, his reputation as a philosopher was confined to his own age. He could offer no secure guidance to the nation in the difficulties which lay ahead of it.

The religious philosopher, Berkeley, intruded an uncommon and nobler feature in his view of the Empire. The conception of it as a gigantic commercial agency was repellent to his mind, and he hoped to harness it to a higher use than the furtherance of British commerce. He was overcome by a sense of the degeneracy of Europe and he had been appalled by the widespread evidences of spiritual desiccation and the mania for gambling which had shaken France and Great Britain. Despairing of the Old World he looked to the New to save humanity and preserve a Christian civilisation. In England, where "infidels have passed for fine gentlemen and venal traitors for men of sense", it was hopeless to undertake any generous enterprise, and so he conceived his grand imperial project of founding a university at Bermuda, which was to form the centre of a Christian civilisation. Berkeley, like Swift, felt that it was a grave reproach to Britain that 1 Junius, Letters, ed. Good, J. M. (1812), I, 103.

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