Our Enemy, The State by Albert J. Nock
Part 4
After conquest and confiscation have been affected and the state set up, its first concern is with the land.
The state assumes the right of eminent domain over its territorial basis,
whereby every landholder becomes in theory a tenant of the state.
In its capacity as ultimate landlord, the state distributes the land among its beneficiaries on its own terms.
A point to be observed in passing is that by the state system of land tenure,
each original transaction confers two distinct monopolies, entirely different in their nature,
inasmuch as one concerns the right to labor-made property, and the other concerns the right to purely law-made property.
The one is a monopoly of the use-value of land, and the other a monopoly of the economic rent of land.
The first gives the right to keep other persons from using the land in question or trespassing on it,
and the right to exclusive possession of values accruing from the application of labour to it.
Values that is, which are produced by exercise of the economic means upon the particular property in question.
Monopoly of economic rent, on the other hand, gives the exclusive right to values accruing from the desire of other persons to possess that property, values which take their rise irrespective of any exercise of the economic means on the part of the landholder.
Economic rent arises when, for whatever reason, two or more persons compete for the possession of a piece of land and it increases directly according to the number of persons competing.
The whole of Manhattan Island was bought originally by a handful of Hollanders from a handful of Indians for $24 worth of trinkets.
The subsequent rise in land values, as we call it, was brought about by the steady influx of population and the consequent high competition for portions of the island's surface,
and these ensuing values were monopolized by the holders.
They grew to an enormous size, and the holders profited accordingly.
The Aster, Wendell and Trinity Church estates have always served as classical examples for study of the state system of land tenure.
Bearing in mind that the state is the organization of the political means,
but its primary intention is to enable the economic exploitation of one class by another,
we see that it is always acted on the principle already cited that expropriation must precede exploitation.
There is no other way to make the political means effective.
The first postulate of fundamental economics is that man is a land animal, deriving his subsistence solely from the land.
His entire wealth is produced by the application of labor and capital to land.
No form of wealth known to man can be produced in any other way.
Hence, if his free access to land be shut off by legal preemption,
he can apply his capital only with the landowner's consent
and on the landowner's terms.
In other words, it is at this point, and at this point only, that exploitation becomes practicable.
Therefore, the first concern of the state must be invariably, as we find it invariably is,
with its policy of land tenure.
I state these elementary matters as briefly as I can.
The reader may easily find a full exposition of them elsewhere.
I am here concerned only to show why the state system of land tenure came into being
and why its maintenance is necessary to the state's existence.
If this system were broken up, obviously the reason for the state's existence would disappear
and the state itself would disappear with it.
With this in mind, it is interesting to observe that although all our public policies would seem to be in process of exhaustive review, no publicist has anything to say about the state system of land tenure.
This is no doubt the best evidence of its importance.
Under the feudal state, there was no great amount of traffic in land.
When William, for example, set up the Norman state in England after conquest and confiscation in 1066 to 1076, his associated banditti, among whom he parceled out the confiscated territory, did nothing to speak of in the way of developing their holdings, and did not contemplate gain from the increment of rental values. In fact, economic rent hardly existed. Their fellow beneficiaries were not in the market to any great extent, and the dispossession
Feudal regime was a regime of status under which landed estates yielded hardly any rental value and only a moderate use value but carried an enormous insignia value.
Land was regarded more as a badge of nobility than an active asset, its possession marked a man as belonging to the exploiting class, and the size of his holdings seems to have counted for more than the number of his exploiting people.
and the size of his holdings seems to have counted for more than the number of his
exploitable dependents.
The encroachments of the merchant state, however, brought about a change in these
circumstances.
The importance of rental values were recognized
and speculative trading in land became general.
Hence, in a study of the merchant state, as it appeared full-blown in America,
It is a point of utmost importance to remember that from the time of the first colonial settlement to the present day, America has been regarded as practically limitless field for speculation in rental values.
One may say at a safe venture that every colonial enterpriser and proprietor after Raleigh's time understood economic rent and the conditions necessary to enhance it.
The Swedish, Dutch and British trading companies understood this.
Endicott and Winthrop of the autonomous merchant state on the bay understood it.
So did Penn and the Calverts.
So did the Carolinian proprietors, to whom Charles II granted a lordly belt of
territory south of Virginia,
reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
And, as we have seen, Roger Williams and Clark understood it perfectly.
Indeed, land speculation may be put down as the first major industry
established in colonial America.
Professor Sikolsky calls attention to the fact that it was flourishing in the
South before the commercial importance of either Negroes or tobacco was
recognized.
These two staples came fully into their own about 1670,
tobacco perhaps a little earlier, but not much.
And before that, England and Europe had been well covered by a lively propaganda
of Southern Landholders advertising for settlers.
Mr. Sokolsky makes it clear that very few original enterprises in American rental values
ever got much profit out of their ventures. This is worth remarking here as enforcing
the point that what gives rise to economic rent is the presence of a population engaged
in a settled exercise of the economic means or, as we commonly put it, working for a living
or again in technical terms applying labor and capital to natural resources for
the production of wealth.
It was no doubt a very fine dignified thing for
Carteret, Berkeley and their associate nobility
to be the owners of a province as large as the Carolinas.
But if no population were settled there,
producing wealth by exercise of economic means,
obviously not a foot of it would bear a penny worth of rental value,
and the proprietor's chance of exercising the political means would
therefore be precisely nil.
Proprietors who made the most profitable exercise of the political means have
been those, or rather speaking strictly the heirs of those,
like the Brevoets, Wendels, Whitney's, Astors and
Gerlitz, who owned land in an actual or prospective urban centre
and held it as an investment rather than for speculation.
The lure of the political means in America, however, gave rise to a state of mind which
may be profitably examined. Under the feudal state, living by the political means was enabled
only by the accident of birth, or in some special cases by the accident of personal
favor. Persons outside these categories of accident had no chance whatever to live otherwise
than by the economic means. No matter how much they have wished to exercise the political means or how greatly they may have envied the privileged few who could exercise it, they were unable to do so. The feudal regime was strictly one of status. Under the merchant state, on the contrary, the political means was open to anyone, irrespective of birth or position, who had the sagacity and the determination necessary to get at it.
In this respect, America appeared as a field of unlimited opportunity. The effect of this was to produce a race of people whose master concern was to avail themselves of the opportunity. They had but one spring of action, which was the determination to abandon the economic means as soon as they could, and at any sacrifice of conscience or character, and live by the political means. From the beginning, this
Determination has been universal, amounting to monomania.
We need not concern ourselves here with the effect upon the general balance of advantage
produced by supplanting the feudal state by the merchant state. We may observe only that
certain virtues and integrities were bred by the regime of status to which the regime
Regime of Contract appears to be inimical, even destructive. Vestiges of them persist
among peoples who have had a long experience of the regime of status, but in America, which
has had no such experience, they do not appear. What the compensations for their absence may
be, or whether they may be regarded as adequate, I repeat, need not concern us. We remark only
and the simple fact that they have not struck root in the Constitution of the American character
at large, and apparently cannot do so.
2. It was said at the time, I believe, that the actual causes of the colonial revolution
of 1776 would never be known. The causes assigned by our school books may be dismissed as trivial,
the various partisan and propagandist views of that struggle and its origins may be put
Great evidential value may be attached to the long line of adverse commercial legislation laid down by the British state from 1651 onwards, especially to that portion of it which was enacted after the merchant state established itself firmly in England in consequence of the events in 1688.
The legislation included the Navigation Acts, the Trade Acts, Acts regulating the colonial currency, the Act of 1752 regulating the process of levy and distress, and the procedures leading up to the establishment of the Board of Trade in 1696.
These directly affected the industrial and commercial interests in the colonies, though just how seriously is perhaps an open question, enough at any rate beyond doubt to provoke deep resentment.
Over and above these, however, if the reader will put himself back into the ruling passion of the time, he will at once appreciate the import of two matters which have for some reason escaped the attention of historians.
The first of these is the attempt of the British state to limit the exercise of the political
means in respect of rental values. In 1763, it forbade the colonists to take up lands
lying westward of the source of any river flowing through the Atlantic seaboard. The
deadline, thus established, ran so as to cut off from preemption about half of Pennsylvania
and half of Virginia and everything to the West thereof.
This was serious, with the mania for speculation running as high as it did, with the consciousness
of opportunity real or fancied having become so acute and so general, this ruling affected
everybody.
One can get some idea of its effect by imagining the state of mind of our people at large if
stock gambling had suddenly been outlawed at the beginning of the last great boom in
in Wall Street a few years ago.
For by this time the colonists had begun to be faintly aware of the illimitable resources
of the country lying westward.
They had learned just enough about them to fire their imagination and their avarice to
a white heat.
The seaboard had been pretty well taken up, the free-holding farmer had been pushed back
farther and farther, population was coming in steadily, the maritime towns were growing.
Under these conditions, Western lands had become a center of attraction.
Rental values depended on population.
The population was bound to expand, and the one general direction in which it could expand
was westward, where lay an immense and incalculably rich domain waiting for preemption.
What could be more natural than that the colonists should itch to get their hands on this territory
and exploit it for themselves alone and on their own terms
without risk of arbitrary interference by the British state.
And this of necessity meant political independence.
It takes no great stress of imagination to see that
anyone in those circumstances would have felt that way
and that colonial resentment against the arbitrary limitation which the Edict of
1763
put upon the political means must therefore have been great.
The actual state of land speculation during the colonial period will give a
fair idea of the probabilities in the case.
Most of it was done on the company system. A number of adventurers would
unite, secure a grant of land, survey it,
and then sell it off as speedily as they could.
Their aim was a quick turnover. They did not, as a rule, contemplate holding land,
– much less settling it. In short, their ventures were a pure gamble in rental values.
Among these pre-revolutionary enterprises was the Ohio Company, formed in 1748 with
a grant of half a million acres, the Loyal Company, which like the Ohio Company was composed
of Virginians, the Transylvania, the Vandalia, Schiotto, Indiana, Wabash, Illinois, Susquehanna,
and others whose holdings were smaller.
It is interesting to observe the names of persons concerned in these undertakings.
One cannot escape the significance of this connection in view of their attitude towards
the revolution and their subsequent career as statesmen and patriots.
For example, aside from his individual ventures, General Washington was a member of the Ohio
Company and a prime mover in organizing the Mississippi Company.
He also conceived the scheme of the Potomac Company, which was designed to raise the rental
value of Western holdings by affording an outlet for their produce by canal and portage
to the Potomac River, and thence to the seaboard. This enterprise determined the establishment
of the national capital in its present most ineligible situation, for the proposed terminus
of the canal was at that point. Washington picked up some lots in the city that bears
has his name, but in common with other early speculators, he did not make much money out
of them. They were appraised at about $20,000 when he died.
Patrick Henry was an inveterate and voracious engrosser of land lying beyond the deadline
set by the British state. Later he was heavily involved in the affairs of one of the notorious
Henry bought up all these certificates that he could get his hands on, at ten cents on the dollar, and made a great profit on them by their rise in value when Hamilton put through his measure for having the central government assume the debts they represent.
Undoubtedly, it was this trait of unrestrained avarice which earned him the dislike of Mr. Jefferson, who said, rather contemptuously, that he was insatiable in money.
Benjamin Franklin's thrifty mind turned cordially to the project of the Vandalia Company, and he acted successfully as promoter for it in England in 1766.
in 1796. Timothy Pickering, who was Secretary of State under Washington and John Adams went
on to record in 1796 that all I am now worth was gained in speculations in land. Silas
Deane, emissary of the Continental Congress in France was interested in the Illinois and
Wabash companies, as was Robert Morris, who managed the revolution's finances, as was
There was also James Wilson, who became a justice of the Supreme Court and a mighty
man in post-revolutionary land grabbing.
Wolcott of Connecticut and Stiles, president of Yale College, held stock in the Susquehanna
Company.
So did Pelletier-Webster, Ethan Allen and Jonathan Trumbull, the brother Jonathan, whose
His name was a long sobriquet for the typical American, and is still sometimes so used.
James Duane, the first mayor of New York, carried out some quite considerable speculative
undertakings, and however indisposed one may feel towards entertaining the effect, so did
the father of the revolution himself, Samuel Adams.
A mere common-sense view of the situation would indicate that the British state's interference
with the free exercise of the political means was at least as great an incitement to revolution
as its interference through the Navigation Acts and the Trade Acts with the free exercise
of the economic means. In the nature of things it would be a greater incitement, both because
it affected a more numerous class of persons and because speculation in land values represented
much easier money. Aligned with this is the second matter which seems to me deserving
It would seem the most natural thing in the world for the colonists to perceive that independence would not only give freer access to this one mode of the political means, but that it would also open access to other modes which the colonial status made unavailable.
The merchant state existed in the royal provinces completely in structure, but not in function.
It did not give access to all the modes of economic exploitation.
The advantages of a state which should be wholly autonomous in this respect must have been clear to the colonists,
and must have moved them strongly towards the project of establishing one.
Again, it is purely a common sense view of the circumstances that leads to this conclusion.
The merchant state in England had emerged triumphant from conflict, and the colonists
had plenty of chance to see what it could do in the way of distributing the various
means of economic exploitation and its methods of doing it. For instance, certain English
concerns were in the carrying trade between America and England, for which other English
English Concerns Built Ships
Americans could compete in both these lines of business.
If they did so, the carrying charges would be regulated by the terms of this competition.
If not, they would be regulated by monopoly, or, in our historic phrase, they could be
set as high as the traffic would bear.
English carriers and shipbuilders made common cause, approached the state and asked it to
to intervene, which it did by forbidding the colonists to ship goods on any but English-built
and English-operated ships. Since freight charges are a factor in prices, the effect
of this intervention was to enable British shipowners to pocket the difference between
monopoly rates and competitive rates. To enable them, that is, to exploit the consumer by
employing the political means. Similar interventions were made at the instance of cutlers, nail
Steelmakers, hatters, steelmakers, etc.
These interventions took the form of simple prohibition.
Another mode of intervention appeared in the customs duties laid by the British state on
foreign sugar and molasses.
We all now know pretty well, probably, that the primary reason for a tariff is that it
enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer
robbery.
All the reasons regularly assigned are debatable, this one is not, hence propagandists and lobbyists
never mention it. The colonists were well aware of this reason, and the best evidence
that they were aware of it is that long before the union was established, the merchant enterprises
and industrialists were ready and waiting to set upon the new formed administration
with an organized demand for a tariff.
It is clear that while in the nature of things the British state's interventions upon the
economic means would stir up great resentment among the interests directly concerned, they
would have another effect fully as significant, if not more so, in causing those interests
to look favorably on the idea of political independence.
They could hardly have helped seeing the positive as well as the negative advantages that would
would accrue from setting up a state of their own, which they might bend to their own purposes.
It takes no great amount of imagination to reconstruct the vision that appeared before
them of a merchant state clothed with the full powers of intervention and discrimination,
a state which should first and last help business, and which should be administered by persons
of actual interest like their own. It is hardly presumable that the colonists generally were
are not intelligent enough to see this vision, or that they were not resolute enough to risk
the chance of realizing it when the time could be made right. As it was, the time was ripened
almost before it was ready. We can discern a distinct line of common purpose uniting the
interests of the actual or potential speculator in rental values, uniting the Hancock, Gores,
Otis's with the Henry's, Lee's, Walcott's, Trumbull's, and leading directly towards the
The goal of political independence.
The main conclusion, however, towards which these observations tend, is that one general
frame of mind existed among the colonists with reference to the nature and primary function
of the state.
This frame of mind was not peculiar to them.
They shared it with the beneficiaries of the merchant state in England, and with those
of the feudal state as far back as the state's history can be traced, Voltaire surveying
According to a study of the Federal Reserve, the state is a device for taking money out
of one set of pockets and putting it in another. The beneficiaries of the feudal state had
precisely this view, and they bequeathed it unchanged and unmodified to the actual
and potential beneficiaries of the merchant state. The colonists regarded the state primarily
as an instrument whereby one might help oneself and hurt others. That is to say, first and
and foremost they regarded it as the organization of the political means.
No other view of the state was ever held in colonial America.
Romance and poetry were brought to bear on the subject in the customary way.
Glamorous myths about it were propagated with the customary intent, but when it all came
to all, nowhere in colonial America were actual practical relations with the state ever determined
3. The Charter of the American Revolution was the Declaration of Independence, which took its stand on the double theses of unalienable natural rights and popular sovereignty. We have seen that these doctrines were theoretically, or as politicians say, in principle, congenial to the spirit of the English merchant-enterpreiser, and we may see that in the nature of things
A thin and scattered population with a whole world before it, with a vast territory full of rich resources which anyone might take a hand at pre-empting and exploiting, would be strongly on the side of natural rights, as the colonists were from the beginning, and political independence would confirm it in that position. These circumstances would stiffen the American merchant-enterprises in the country.
So also was the sister doctrine of popular sovereignty. The colonists had been through a long and vexatious experience of state interventions which limited their use of both the political and economic means. They had also been given plenty of opportunity to see how the interventions had been managed, and how they could be used in the right way.
This is how the interested English economic groups, which did the managing, had profited at their expense.
Hence, there was no place in their minds for any political theory that disallowed the right of individual self-expression in politics,
as their situation tended to make them natural-born economic individualists, so it also tended to make them natural-born Republicans.
Thus, the preamble of the Declaration hit the mark of accordial unanimity.
Its two leading doctrines could easily be interpreted as justifying an unlimited economic
pseudo-individualism on the part of the State's beneficiaries and a judicially managed exercise
of political self-expression by the electorate.
Whether or not this were a more free and easy interpretation than a strict construction
The preamble, nevertheless, did reflect a general state of mind, however incompetent the understanding of its doctrines may have been, and however interested the motives which prompted that understanding.
There was complete unanimity also in the nature of the new and independent political institution which the Declaration contemplated as within the right of the people to set up. There was a great and memorable dissension about its form, but none about its nature. It should be in essence a mere continuator of the merchant state already existing.
There was no idea of setting up government, the purely social institution which should have no other object than, as the Declaration put it, to secure the natural rights of the individual, or as Paine put it, which should contemplate nothing beyond the maintenance of freedom and security, the institution which should make no positive interventions of any kind upon the individual, but should confine itself exclusively to such negative interventions as the maintenance of freedom might indicate.
The idea was to perpetuate an institution of another character entirely, the state, the organization of the political means, and this was accordingly done.
There is no disparagement implied in this observation, for, all questions of motive aside, nothing else was to be expected.
No one knew any other kind of political organization.
The causes of American complaints were conceived of as due only to interested and culpable maladministration, not to the necessarily anti-social nature of the institution administered.
Dissatisfaction was directed against administrators, not against the institution itself.
Violent dislike of the form of the institution, the monarchical form, was engendered, but no distrust or suspicion of its nature.
The character of the state had never been subjected to scrutiny, the cooperation of the zeitgeist was needed for that, and it was not yet to be had.
One may see here a parallel with the revolutionary movements against the Church in the 16th century, and indeed with revolutionary movements in general.
They are incited by abuses and misfeasances, more or less specific and always secondary,
and are carried on with no idea beyond getting them rectified or avenged, usually by the
sacrifice of conspicuous scapegoats.
The philosophy of the institution that gives play to these malfeasances is never examined,
and hence they recur promptly under another form or other auspices, or else their place
This case is taken by others which are in character precisely like them. Thus the notorious
failure of reforming and revolutionary movements in the long run may as a rule be found due
to their incorrigible superficiality. One mind indeed came within reaching distance
of the fundamentals of the matter not by employing the historical method but by a homespun kind
of Reasoning, aided by a sound and sensitive instinct.
The common view of Mr. Jefferson as a doctrinaire believer in the stark principle of states'
rights is most incompetent and misleading. He believed in states' rights assuredly,
but he went much further. States' rights were only an incident of his general system
of political organization. He believed that the ultimate political unit, the repository
The theory and source of political authority and initiative should be the smallest unit,
not the federal unit, state unit or county unit, but the township, or as he called it,
the ward. The township and the township only should determine the delegation of power upwards
to the county, the state and the federal units. This system of extreme decentralization is
interesting and perhaps worth a moment's examination, because if the idea of the state is ever displaced
by the idea of government, it seems probable that the practical expression of this idea
would come out very nearly in that form. There is probably no need to say that the consideration
of such a displacement involves a long look ahead and over a field of view that is cluttered
with the debris of a most discouraging number, not of nations alone but of whole civilizations.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to remind ourselves that more than 150 years ago, one American succeeded in getting below the surface of things, and that he probably to some degree anticipated the judgment of an immeasurably distant future.
In February 1816, Mr. Jefferson wrote a letter to Joseph C. Cabell, in which he expounded the philosophy behind his system of political organization.
What is it, he asks, that has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun, the generalizing and concentrating all powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of the Venetian Senate?
The secret of freedom will be found in the individual, making himself the depository of the powers, respecting himself so far as he is competent to them, and delegating only what is beyond his competence by a synthetical process to higher and higher orders of functionaries, so as to trust fewer and fewer powers in proportion as the trustees become more and more oligarchical.
This idea rests on accurate observation, for we are all aware that not only the wisdom of the ordinary man, but also his interest and sentiment have a very short radius of operation.
They cannot be stretched over an area of much more than a township size, and it is the acme of absurdity to suppose that any man or any body of men can arbitrarily exercise their wisdom, interest and sentiment over a statewide or nationwide area with any kind of success.
Therefore the principle must hold that the larger the area of exercise, the fewer and more clearly defined should be the functions exercised.
Moreover, by placing under everybody what his own eye may superintend, there is erected
the surest safeguard against usurpation of freedom. Where every man is a sharer in the
direction of his ward republic or of some of the higher ones, and feels that he is a
participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year,
But every day, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power rested
from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.
No such idea of popular sovereignty, however, appeared in the political organization that
was set up in 1789, far from it.
In devising their structure, the American architects followed certain specifications
by Harrington, Locke and Adam Smith, which might be regarded as a sort of official digest of politics under the merchant state.
Indeed, if one wished to be perhaps a little inerbane in describing them, though not actually unjust, one might say that they are the merchant state's defense mechanism.
Harrington laid down the all-important principle that the basis of politics is economic, that power follows property.
Since he was arguing against the feudal concept, he laid stress specifically on landed property.
He was, of course, too early to perceive the bearings of the state system of land tenure upon industrial exploitation,
and neither he nor Locke perceived any natural distinction to be drawn between law-made property and labor-made property.
Nor yet does Smith perceive this clearly, though he seems to have had occasional indistinct glimpses of it.
According to Harrington's theory of economic determinism, the realization of popular sovereignty is a simple matter.
Since political power proceeds from landownership, a simple diffusion of landownership is all that is needed to ensure a satisfactory distribution of power. If everybody owns, then everybody rules. If the people hold three parts in four of the territory, Harrington says, it is plain that there can be neither any single person nor nobility able to dispute the government with them. In this case, therefore,
For except force be interposed, they govern themselves.
Locke, writing half a century later, when the revolution of 1688 was over, concerned
himself more particularly with the state's positive confiscatory interventions upon other
modes of property ownership. These had long been frequent and vexatious, and under the
Stuarts they had amounted to unconscionable high-womenry. Locke's idea, therefore, was
to copper rivets such a doctrine of the sacredness of property as would forever put a stop to
this sort of thing. Hence he laid it down that the first business of the state is to
maintain the absolute inviolability of general property rights. The state itself might not
violate them, because in doing so it would act against its own primary function. Thus
in Locke's view, the rights of property took precedence over those of life and liberty,
And if it ever came to the pinch, the state must make its choice accordingly.
Thus, while the American architects assented in principle to the philosophy of natural
rights and popular sovereignty and found it in a general way highly congenial as a sort
of voucher for their self-esteem, their practical interpretation of it left it pretty well hamstrung.
They were not especially concerned with consistency. Their practical interest in this philosophy stopped short at the point, which we have already noted, of its presumptive justification of a ruthless economic pseudo-individualism and an exercise of political self-expression by the general electorate which should be so managed as to be, in all essential respects, futile.
In this, they took precise pattern by the English Whig, exponents and practitioners of this philosophy.
Locke himself, whom we have seen putting the natural rights of property so high above those of life and liberty,
was equally discriminating in his view of popular sovereignty.
He was no believer in what he called a numerous democracy,
and did not contemplate a political organization that should countenance anything of the kind.
The sort of organization he had in mind is reflected in the extraordinary constitution he devised for the Royal Province of Carolina, which established a basic order of politically inarticulate serfdom.
Such an organization as this represented was about the best in a practical way that the British merchant state was ever able to do for the doctrine of popular sovereignty.
It was also about the best that the American counterpart of the British merchant state could do.
The sum of the matter is that while the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty afforded a set of principles upon which all interests could unite,
and practically all did unite, with the aim of securing political independence,
it did not afford a satisfactory set of principles on which to found the new American state.
When political independence was secured, the stark doctrine of the Declaration went into
abeyance, with only a distorted simulacrum of its principles surviving. The rights of
life and liberty were recognized by a mere constitutional formality left open to eviscerating
interpretations or, where there were for any reason deemed superfluous, to simple executive
and all consideration of the rights attending the Pursuit of Happiness was narrowed down to a plenary acceptance of Locke's doctrine of the preeminent rights of property, with law-made property on an equal footing with labour-made property.
As for popular sovereignty, the new state had to be republican in form, for no other would suit the general temper of the people,
People, and hence its peculiar task was to preserve the appearance of actual republicanism
without the reality. To do this, it took over the apparatus by which we have seen the English
merchant state adopting when confronted with a like task, the apparatus of a representative
or parliamentary system. Moreover, it improved upon the British model of this apparatus by
by adding three auxiliary devices which time has proved most effective.
These were, first, the device of the fixed term, which regulates the administration of
our system by astronomical rather than political considerations, by the motion of the earth
around the sun rather than by political exigency.
Second, the device of judicial review and interpretation which, as we have already observed,
is a process whereby anything may be made to mean anything.
Third, the device of requiring legislators to reside in the district they represent,
which puts the highest conceivable premium upon pliancy and venality, and it therefore
the best mechanism for rapidly building up an immense body of patronage.
It may be perceived at once that all these devices tend of themselves to work smoothly
as well as one can put a date to such an event, the surrender at Yorktown marks the sudden and complete disappearance of the Declaration's doctrine from the political consciousness of America. Mr. Jefferson resided in Paris as Minister for Foreign Affairs.
to France from 1784 to 1789. As the time for his return to America drew near, he wrote
Colonel Humphreys that he hoped soon to possess myself anew by conversation with my countrymen
of their spirit and ideas. I know only the Americans of the year 1784. They tell me this
is to be much stranger to those of 1789. So indeed he found it. On arriving in New
In New York and resuming his place in the social life of the country, he was greatly
depressed by the discovery that the principles of the Declaration had gone wholly by the
board. No one spoke of natural rights and popular sovereignty. It would seem actually
that no one had ever heard of them. On the contrary, everyone was talking about the pressing
need of a strong central coercive authority able to check the incursions which the democratic
Mr. Jefferson wrote despondently of the contrast of all this with the sort of thing he had been hearing in the France which he had just left in the first year of her resolution, in the fervour of natural rights and zeal for reformation.
In the process of possessing himself anew of the spirit and ideas of his countrymen, he said,
in the fervour of natural rights and zeal for reformation.
In the process of possessing himself anew of the spirit and ideas of his countrymen, he said,
I cannot describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversations filled me.
Clearly, though the Declaration might have been the Charter for American Independence,
It was in no sense the charter for the new American state.