The British Empire's Parental Role
Letters From a Pennsylvania Farmer #5: Will Child Be Friend or Foe?
John Dickinson asks the questions that historians have asked ever since they began to analyze the cause of the American Revolution. How could the Empire of Great Britain bungle things so badly? Was it impossible for them to be able to feel the pulse of their American Colonies? Were they collectively ignorant or just obtuse? It wasn’t as if the English were not warned. In fact, there was probably no finer, clearer and more respectful warning than the one outlined in this fifth of the farmers letters.
Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies - Letter #5
Issue: Does Great Britain really need to tax the American Colonies to be able to be a solvent nation?
Dickinson:
The Kingdom of England and later the Empire of Great Britain have conducted many very expensive wars in the time that the colonies have been established. There have been good Parliaments and weak Parliaments. There have been great ministers and there have been corrupt ministers. In all of those wars, “none of them ever ventured to touch the Palladium of American liberty. Ambition, avarice, faction, tyranny, all revered it.”
Whenever there was a need for the colonies to chip in with their share of the financial burden, the King merely made a request of the colonies and it was “dutifully complied with.” Parliament only made decisions at times that “regulated their trade, and that of the rest of the empire” to protect the commercial connections of the empire as a whole.
Problem: Why would Great Britain want to tinker with a successful formula for Empire?
Dickinson:
What did the colonies ever ask in return for
- All of the control that the colonies did allow the mother country to have?
- All of the economic benefits the colonies contributed?
- All of the personal investment and loss in establishing themselves?
All they asked for were the their rights as Englishmen, specifically “that great one, the foundation of all the rest—that their property, acquired with so much pain and hazard, should be disposed of by none but themselves or, to use the beautiful and emphatic language of the sacred scriptures, ‘that they should sit every man under his vine, and under his fig-tree, and NONE SHOULD MAKE THEM AFRAID.’”
Solution: Stop the madness! Go back to doing things the way that has proved successful!
Dickinson:
Can any thinking man fail to see that it is the pride of British Liberty that is the basis of each colony’s connection and friendship with Great Britain? Isn’t it obvious that these blatant attempts to collect taxes without consent will “reverse the nature of things?” Can England even attempt to institute this strategy “without reducing them to a state of vassalage?”
The Pennsylvania Farmers Advice:
“It seems extremely probable, that when cool, dispassionate posterity, shall consider the affectionate intercourse, the reciprocal benefits, and the unsuspecting confidence, that have subsisted between these colonies and their parent country, for such a length of time, they will execrate, with the bitterest curses, the infamous memory of those men, whose pestilential ambition unnecessarily, wantonly, cruelly, first opened the forces of civil discord between them; first turned their love into jealousy; and first taught these provinces, filled with grief and anxiety, to inquire …
Mens ubi materna est? (Where is maternal affection?)
Click here to read about The Pennsylvania Farmer's 4th Letter
Click here to read about The Pennsylvania Farmer's 6th Letter
Source
Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies by John Dickinson, Esq.
