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territories, and the colonial system at last assumed coherent form. In many respects the most interesting of these developments was the national rejection of Puritan ideas, possibly because these were largely derived from Holland.1 But though the movement was subordinated, it remained a potent influence in America, where its ideas were worked out more fully and with less restraint than had been possible in England. In the nature of things differences were bound to develop between those who crossed the Atlantic and those who stayed at home, but these were undoubtedly accentuated by the fact that the American point of view, partially shaped by ideas which England had rejected, had begun to diverge from that of England. The unhappy potentialities, however, of the Restoration in this respect were overlooked by contemporaries. Similarly the Revolution was regarded by Englishmen as merely a national affair, and its imperial bearings were not appreciated at their true worth.

In considering English views on the colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it is vital, therefore, to keep in mind that these were not illumined by any idea of growth. Moreover domestic matters, particularly during the seventeenth century, were so engrossing that the colonies dropped out of public notice until the issue between Crown and Parliament had been settled. During the formative period of English colonisation, which we may take as extending to the Restoration, no large problems of colonial government arose; for the establishment of the first English settlements beyond the seas was nothing more than an extension of English commerce. Plantations, in fact, were the only means by which the national instinct for commerce could be satisfied, and the State was required merely to give a legal sanction to settlements formed by private enterprise. Settlements of this type were too weak at first to be treated as political communities; they were, in truth, private estates and were regarded as such. Consequently they were put on the same legal status as the guilds, boroughs, and trading companies of England. The movement, however, which resulted in the 3. colonisation of New England, was of a totally different character; for it represented, in the minds of its founders, a schism from the State rather than a trading enterprise. The extent to which the expansion of England is linked up with commerce is amply proven by the tone of pamphlets issued not merely during the formative stage but throughout the whole period. Plantations were criticised on the ground that they were unprofitable to the kingdom, while supporters of the colonising movement sought to show that the settlements were of benefit to England. This commercial aspect is clearly brought out in the references of Bacon to the colonies.

Bacon, whose great fault was that he had no faith in his own maxim that knowledge is power, was too practical-minded to draft any 1 Campbell, D., The Puritan in Holland, England, and America (first ed. 1892), pp. xxvi–xxxi.

BACON AND THE PLANTATIONS

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Utopian schemes of government. He was too conscious of his own defects to pasture on illusions, and he knew that the process of transporting a man to a new world would not change his nature. His scientific mind, however, revolted at the thought of missed opportunities, and he realised that the new world could not be used to the greatest advantage unless it was peopled by the best of the old. Few statements are better known than the oft-quoted remark in his essay "Of Plantations": "It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant". This was a noble protest against the practice of sending English gaol-birds to Virginia, and he repeated it in a letter of advice to George Villiers in 1616, in which he recommended "that if any transplant themselves into Plantations abroad, who are known schismaticks, outlaws, or criminal persons, that they may be sent for back upon the first notice: such persons are not fit to lay the foundation of a new colony". But his protest passed unheeded. The Government could not resist the temptation to use the colonics as receptacles for superfluous malefactors, and this degrading practice was continued beyond the middle of the nineteenth century.

But while Bacon paid due tribute to the commercial aims of Plantations, he saw that these oversea communities differed enormously from ordinary trading concerns. Some sort of government had to be devised to maintain law and order in the settlements, and with the experience of the Virginia Company in his mind he advised that government should be "in the hands of one, assisted with some. counsel". Such advice was suited to the needs of his own age, and it would be unfair to assume that it represented his final word on colonial government. He was anxious that the utmost care should be taken to appoint suitable governors, and while he advocated the employment of the settlers in trades and manufactures, "such as may be useful to this Kingdom", he was opposed to the Plantations being managed solely in the interests of English merchants and tradesmen. Indeed he wished merchants to be restricted from taking part in government as far as possible since "they look ever to the present gain", while the long perspective is essential to the statesman. The colonies were but puny in Bacon's day, but his prediction of the development of the Plantations into "new kingdoms" suggests that he had envisaged the possibility of England becoming the mother of nations.

While commerce was the true origin of English colonisation, the // invincible tendency of the Englishman to idealise everything in which he is concerned disclosed itself in the emphasis which was placed upon the movement as a counter-blow against the national foc. Bacon entertained no apprehensions about the result of a duel with Spain, for "the wealth of both Indies seems, in great part, but an accessory

1 Bacon, F., Works, ed. Spedding, VI, 21.

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to the command of the seas", and Spain's pretensions to maritime supremacy had been dispelled by the capture of Cadiz in 1596. National sentiment as expressed through Parliament remained faithful to the Elizabethan tradition and on the renewal of war with Spain in 1624 condemned "the diverting of his Majesty's course of wars from the West Indies, which was the most facile and hopeful way for this kingdom to prevail against the Spaniard, to an expenceful and successless attempt upon Cadiz".1 Parliament was as vigilant as the Crown in its regard for the welfare of the Plantations, and after the outbreak of the Civil War a Commission was appointed under the Earl of Warwick to supervise the colonies.2 After the establishment of the Commonwealth, when the first need of England was to frame a new constitution, even the dispassionate James Harrington, in the preface to his Oceana (1656), allowed himself to exult in the imperial destiny awaiting his country "upon the mightiest foundation that any has been laid from the beginning of the World to this day”. Even Venice took rank below Oceana, for "the Sea gives law to the growth of Venice, but the growth of Oceana gives law to the Sea". The spirit of imperialism is contained in his statement that "to ask whether it be lawful for a Commonwealth to aspire to the Empire of the World, it is to ask whether it be lawful for it to do its duty, or to put the World into a better condition than it was before". But when he descended to particulars he struck a less confident note. “If you have subdued a nation that is capable of Liberty", he declared, "you shall make them a present of it"; while his well-known words that the colonies "are yet Babes that cannot live without sucking the breasts of the Mother Cities, but such as I mistake if when they come of age they do not wean themselves" seem prophetic of the disruption.

In truth, his imperial aspirations were at variance with his intellectual convictions, and possibly Harrington was the first Englishman to realise that the government of England and the government of an Empire were two very different things. Engaged in an attempt to solve the difficulty of England only, he saw that his solution, however satisfactory it might be to his countrymen, could not but prove irksome to the colonists. This recognition of the fact that the government of the Empire had to be considered apart from the government of the nation marks Harrington off from all other Englishmen of his age, and it was unfortunate that the difficulty which he discerned, though he refused to explore it, was not realised as clearly by the thinkers of the Revolution period, when the time was opportune for a reconsideration of the whole field of colonial government. His system of government expounded in Oceana had never any real chance of becoming operative, but it attracted considerable attention among his contemporaries by reason of the novelty of the devices which were

1 Stock, L. F., Proceedings and Debates of British Parliaments respecting North America, 1, 128. 2 Ibid. 1, 146.

PROPERTY AND POLITICAL POWER

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necessary for its working, and the ideas underlying it were destined to exercise a substantial influence both at home and in America.

His analysis of the history of England had driven him to the conviction that the country owed its troubles partly to the fact that political power did not correspond with the balance of property and partly to defects in the English parliamentary system. The existing Parliament was not truly representative of the nation, and with the vast increase that had taken place in the number of landowners a monarchic system was no longer suitable for the country. Government had to be altered so as to fit in with the changed conditions. Property in land was to be stated "at such a balance that the power can never swerve out of the hands of the many". Harrington possibly weakened his case by regarding property in land as the most worthy and influential form of wealth, but his views in this respect were so completely in accordance with those of the English governing class that they were afterwards accepted and applied, but in a manner of which he would not have approved. His exposition of the doctrine of the balance of property was intended to show that a stable government could be formed only on a republican basis, and for this reason he proposed that no person should own an estate worth more than £2000 per annum, whereas after the Restoration monarchy came to be esteemed as the principal safeguard of property against the encroachments of the landless. Political power largely depended upon property in land, and the connection of the two in the minds of Englishmen was at least partly responsible for the Whig monopoly of political office during the eighteenth century. The Anglo-Saxon race has always been conspicuous for its reverence for property, and only an Englishman could have elevated it to the dignity of a natural law. This was the work of John Locke, whose second treatise on Civil Government confirmed Englishmen in their conviction that there was a natural connection between government and property. But the idea was really inherent in the race, and Americans were as quick as Englishmen to resent attacks on property. Thus in 1771 the Assembly of Massachusetts in complaining against British taxation said that it formed "a tribute levied and extorted from those, who, if they have a property, have a right to the absolute disposal of it".

While Harrington was a democrat, he was no friend of mob-rule, and he introduced four devices to prevent government from falling under the control of the rabble. These devices consisted of the use of the ballot, indirect election, rotation, and a system of two chambers, of which one was only to debate and the other only to vote. Harrington was typically Puritan in his belief that "Government is the Empire of Laws, and not of Men". He looked on government as a piece of machinery which could be kept in good running order provided that the laws of which it was composed were shrewdly excogitated. From this type of mind sprouted the fundamental law

and the rigid constitution, which Puritanism failed to establish in England but succeeded in setting up in America. All Englishmen of the Puritan cast, however, had not the unwavering faith of Harrington that laws alone would keep government pure and wholesome; Penn, for example, realised that "governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them", but belief in legal devices and checks to prevent corruption has always been a feature of the American political creed.

All the particular contrivances advocated by Harrington had been tested. The ballot, suggested by the practice of Venice, had been experimented with in Massachusetts and Connecticut. But the secrecy which recommended it to Harrington was displeasing to Englishmen, and we learn from Oldmixon that the Pennsylvanians refused to make use of the ballot because "they were Englishmen and not bound to give their Votes in Huggermother: their Faces and their Voices should always go together". The method of indirect election was employed in Dutch and Italian cities and also in commercial and ecclesiastical corporate bodies. The "Agitators" of the New Model Army were appointed by a process of indirect election in 1647. The principle of rotation was designed to prevent magistrates from entrenching themselves in office and had been already suggested by George Wither in The Perpetual Parliament, a political poem published either in 1650 or 1653. Harrington, then, simply pressed into his service devices with which his contemporaries were familiar, but gave them an added significance by applying them on a national scale.

Chosen by the aid of these precautions against corruption, the Parliament of Oceana was to consist of a Senate and an Assembly, the Senate proposing and the Assembly resolving; for he held that an Assembly without a Senate could not be wise and that a Senate without an Assembly would not be honest. Since power could not be safely confined to any one man or one class, the Legislature, Executive, and Judiciary were to be kept apart. In common with Milton and Cromwell, Harrington pleaded for religious toleration, and he gave it a fresh importance by showing that where there was no liberty of conscience there could be no democracy.

The attempt to define the relations of England to Scotland and Ireland evidently gave Harrington much food for reflection. At one time he suggested that Scotland and Ireland should be represented in Parliament, but should be governed by Councils of State, elected from retiring Senators, with the assistance of provincial armies. Ultimately he drifted to the sound position that union based on compulsion could never be effective, and in 1659 he appealed for a "just league" which would leave Scotland and Ireland with their own laws and their own government.

It was even more difficult to decide on the treatment to be accorded

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