The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [95]
What of the alternative available to the British? It was, as many thought, to give the Americans the representation in Parliament they claimed and let taxation follow. At one stroke, this would have invalidated American resistance. While other dynamics of conflict were present, nothing raises tempers like money, and taxation was the Americans’ most vibrant issue. They were ready enough to claim representation as a right but the fact was that they did not really want it in the flesh. The Stamp Act Congress agreed to declare it “impractical.”
In all discussions of representation, much was made of the 3000-mile distance, where “seas roll and months pass” between order and execution. Yet distance did not prevent Americans from ordering English furnishings, clothes and books, adopting English fashions, sending children to English schools, corresponding steadily with colleagues in Europe, sending botanical specimens, absorbing ideas and generally maintaining a close cultural relationship. It was not so much the “vast and hazardous ocean” that was the deterrent as a growing realization in the colonies that what they really wanted was less interference and greater home rule. Although separation, much less independence, was not contemplated, many did not want a closer connection for they shuddered at the corruption of English society. John Adams believed that England had reached the same stage as the Roman Republic, “a venal city, ripe for destruction.” Visiting Americans were shocked at the corrupt politics, the vice, the gap between the “Wealth, Magnificence and splendour” of the rich and the “extreme Misery and distresses of the Poor … amazing on the one hand and disgusting on the other.”
They viewed the patronage system as hostile and dangerous to liberty, for when government rested on purchased support, true political liberty was a dead letter. Englishmen were the only people to have gained that liberty; pervading American polemic in these years was a sense of America’s mission, as inheritor, to foster and preserve it for mankind. Colonial members in Parliament were believed likely to be corrupted by English decadence and in practice would be a helpless minority always outvoted. It was also clear that if the colonies gained representation, they would no longer have grounds for resisting Parliament’s right to tax. Americans recognized this ahead of the English, who, indeed, never seriously considered the advantage to themselves of admitting American representation.
Attitude was again the obstacle; the English could not visualize Americans in terms of equality. Should uncouth provincials, the “spawn of our [prisoners’] transports,” rabble-rousers “with manners no better than Mohawks,” be invited, asked the Gentleman’s Magazine, to occupy the “highest seats of our commonwealth?” To the Morning Post, Americans were “a mongrel breed of Irish, Scotch and Germans leavened with convicts and outcasts.” Deeper than social disdain was fear of the colonials as “levellers” of class, whose representation in Parliament would encourage unrepresented English towns and districts to demand seats, destroying property rights in the boroughs and overturning the system.
The English had contrived a convenient theory of “virtual representation” to cover the masses who lacked votes or members to represent them. Every member of the House, it was maintained, represented the whole body politic, not a particular constituency, and if Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham had no seats and London had only six while Devon and Cornwall had seventy, the former could take comfort in being “virtually represented” by the bluff gentlemen from the country. These gentlemen on the whole, bearing the main weight of the land tax, heartily favored taxing the colonies for their share of the burden and