Conceived in Liberty (129 page)

To the objection that his theory allowed for frequent revolution, Locke countered that “such revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty will be borne by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people... tis not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves....”

The third great influence on America, and perhaps the most widely cited source in the colonies, was the works of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, especially their
Cato’s Letters.
We have already noted the influence of the letters on the freedom of the press, as well as the strong influence of Trenchard and Gordon’s contemporaneous
Independent Whig
series, both written in the early 1720s. Trenchard and Gordon were part of a small group of Englishmen who during the eighteenth century kept alive the torch of liberal Republican principles. This group was variously called “Commonwealthmen,” “Real Whigs,” or “true Whigs.”

The great significance of
Cato’s Letters
is that in them the wealthy John Trenchard and his young protégé Thomas Gordon greatly radicalized the impact of Locke’s libertarian creed. They did so by applying Lockean principles to the concrete nature and problems of government, in a series of powerfully argued and hard-hitting essays that were often cited and reprinted and widely read throughout the American colonies.
Cato’s Letters
did more than merely restate Lockean doctrine. From the position that the people have the right to revolt against a government destructive of liberty, “Cato” proceeded to argue with great force that government is always and everywhere the potential or actual aggressor against the rights and liberties of the people. Liberty, the source of all the fruits of civilization and human happiness, is ever liable to suffer the aggressions and encroachments of government, of power, the source from which war, tyranny, and impoverishment ever flow. Power always stands ready to conspire against liberty, and the only salvation is for the public to keep government within strictly limited bounds, and to be ever watchful, vigilant, and hostile to the inevitable tendencies of government power to encroach upon liberty.

Expounding Lockean doctrine, “Cato” puts it thus:

All men are born free; Liberty is a gift which they receive from God himself; nor can they alienate the same by consent, though possibly they may forfeit it by crimes.... The right of the magistrate arises only from the right of private men to defend themselves, to repel injuries, and to punish those who commit them: that right being conveyed by the society to their public representative, he can execute the same no further than the benefit and security of that society requires he should. When he exceeds his commission, his acts are as extrajudicial as are those of any private officer usurping an unlawful
authority; that is, they are void; and every man is answerable for the wrong which he does. A power to do good can never become a warrant for doing evil.

Liberty
“Cato” defined as “the power which every man has over his own actions, and his right to enjoy the fruit of his labour, art, and industry, as far as by it he hurts not the society, or any members of it, by taking from any member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys. The fruits of a man’s honest industry are the just rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal equity, as is his title to use them in the manner which he thinks fit: And thus, with the above limitations, every man is sole lord and arbiter of his own private actions and property.”

From liberty all other blessings flow:

Indeed liberty is the divine source of all human happiness. To possess, in security, the effects of our industry, is the most powerful and reasonable incitement to be industrious: And to be able to provide for our children, and to leave them all that we have, is the best motive to beget them. But where property is precarious, labour will languish. The privileges of thinking, saying, and doing what we please, and of growing as rich as we can, without any other restriction, than that by all this we hurt not the public, nor one another, are the glorious privileges of liberty; and its effects, to live in freedom, plenty, and safety.

Moreover, “Cato” made clear that the rights and liberties he was enunciating were individual and not those of the majority. The despotism of the majority can be as bad as the tyranny of one or a few:

It is a mistaken notion in government, that the interest of the majority is only to be consulted, since in society every man has a right to everyman’s assistance in the enjoyment and defense of his private property; otherwise the greater number may sell the lesser, and divide their estates amongst themselves; and so, instead of a society, where all peaceable men are protected, become a conspiracy of the many against a minority. With as much equity may one man wantonly dispose of all, and violence may be sanctified by mere Power.

But in this idyll of liberty there is always and ever the threat of the encroachments and aggressions of power, of government:

Only the checks put upon magistrates make nations free; and only the want of such checks makes them slaves. They are free, where their magistrates are confined within certain bounds set them by the people.... And they are slaves, where the magistrates choose their own rules, and follow their lust and humours; than which a more dreadful curse can befall no people... and therefore most nations in the world are undone, and those nations only who bridle their governors do not wear chains.

Once acquiring power, rulers will try their best to keep and extend it:

We know, by infinite examples and experience, that men possessed of Power, rather than part with it, will do any thing, even the worst and the blackest, to keep it; and scarce ever any man upon earth went out of it as long as he could carry everything his own way in it.... This seems certain, that the good of the world, or of their people, was not one of their motives either for continuing in Power, or for quitting it.

It is the nature of Power to be ever encroaching, and converting every extraordinary power, granted at particular times, and upon particular occasions, into an ordinary power, to be used at all times, and when there is no occasion; nor does it ever part willingly with any advantage.

If liberty for “Cato” is the source of human happiness, the tyranny of power is the source of vast human misery:

Tyrants... reduce mankind to the condition of brutes, and make that Reason, which God gave them, useless to them: They deprive them even of the blessings of nature, starve them in the midst of plenty, and frustrate the natural bounty of the earth to men; so that Nature smiles in vain where tyranny frowns: The very hands of men, given them by Nature for their support, are turned by tyrants into the instruments of their misery, by being employed in vile drudgeries or destructive wars, to gratify the lust and vanity of their execrable lords....

Tyrants... are supported by general ruin; they live by the destruction of mankind; and as fraud and villainy, and every species of violence and cruelty, are the props of their throne; so they measure their own happiness, and security, and strength, by the misery and weakness of their people.... That wealth, which dispersed amongst their subjects, and circulated in trade and commerce, would employ, increase, and enrich them... is barbarously robbed from the people, and engrossed by these their oppressors....

Alas! Power encroaches daily upon Liberty, with a success too evident; and the balance between them is almost lost. Tyranny has engrossed almost the whole earth, and striking at mankind root and branch, makes the world a slaughterhouse; and will certainly go on to destroy, till it is either destroyed itself, or, which is most likely, has left nothing else to destroy.

The corruption and lust for power in human nature are the cause of the aggressive nature of power, and therefore require eternal vigilance against power’s encroachments:

There has been always such a constant and certain fund of corruption and malignity in human nature, that it has been rare to find that man, whose views and happiness did not center in the gratification of his appetites, and worst appetites, his luxury, his pride, his avarice, and lust of power and who considered any public trust reposed in him, with any other view, than as the means to satiate such unruly and dangerous desires! And this has been most eminently true of Great Men, and those who aspired to dominion. They were first made
great for the sake of the public, and afterwards at its expense. And if they had been content to have been moderate traitors, mankind would have been still moderately happy; but their ambition and treason observing no degrees, there was no degree of vileness and misery which the poor people did not feel.

The appetites therefore of men, especially of Great Men, are carefully to be observed and stayed, or else they will never stay themselves. The experience of every age convinces us, that we must not judge of men by what they ought to do, but by what they will do; and all history affords but few instances of men trusted with great power without abusing it, when with security they could.

“Cato” assured his readers that there was no danger that the public might exercise its right of revolution against tyrannical government too frequently or imprudently; due to settled habits, as well as the propaganda and power of government, the danger is quite the reverse:

It is foolish to say, that this doctrine can be mischievous to society, at least in any proportion to the wild ruin and fatal calamities which must befall, and do befall the world, when the contrary doctrine is maintained: For, all bodies of men subsisting upon their own substance, or upon the profits of their trade and industry, find their account so much in ease and peace, and have justly such terrible apprehensions of civil disorders, which destroy everything that they enjoy; that they always bear a thousand injuries before they return one, and stand under the burdens as long as they can bear them....

What with the force of education, and the reverence which people are taught, and have been always used to pay to princes; what with the perpetual harangues of flatterers, the gaudy pageantry and outside of Power, and its gilded ensigns, always glittering in their eyes; what with the execution of the laws in the sole power of the prince; what with all the regular magistrates, pompous guards and standing troops, with the fortified towns, the artillery, and all the magazines of war, at his disposal; besides large revenues, and multitudes of followers and dependents, to support and abet all that he does: Obedience to authority is so well secured, that it is wild to imagine, that any number of men, formidable enough to disturb a settled State, can unite together and hope to overturn it, till the public grievances are so enormous, the oppression so great, and the disaffection so universal, that there can be no question remaining, whether their calamities to be real or imaginary, and whether the magistrate has protected or endeavoured to destroy his people.
*

The American colonists eagerly imbibed from Trenchard and Gordon, not only the Lockean doctrine of individual liberty and of the right of revolution against government in what Professor Bernard Bailyn has justly called a “superbly readable” form; but also, and even more important, the dichotomy between liberty and power, and the ever-constant threat to the crucial liberties of the people by the eternal incursions and encroachment
of governmental tyranny. Even more concretely, Trenchard and Gordon were not afraid to point to the corruption and the increasing power of government and its bureaucracy in the relatively free England of their day. It was a warning that the American colonists were eagerly to take to heart.
*

Libertarian English views were also brought to America with a dramatic burst by the great liberal Massachusetts minister, Jonathan Mayhew. We have seen how this deist and Unitarian studied Locke at Harvard and was later to laud the influence upon him of Locke and Algernon Sidney. In early 1750, Mayhew delivered his most celebrated political sermon, significantly as a centennial celebration of the execution of Charles I:
A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers.

This sermon, which has been called the “warning gun of the [American] Revolution,” was the first expression in eighteenth-century America of the sacred right of resistance to tyrannical government. Reason, said Mayhew, dictates the usefulness of obedience to government for social protection; but when government becomes oppressive, when it robs and ruins the public, then “they immediately cease to be the ordinance and ministers of God, and no more deserve that glorious character than common pirates and highwaymen. Rulers,” continued Mayhew, “have no authority from God to do mischief, and citizens have the right to disobey ‘unlawful’ authority,” and “in cases of very great and general oppression... to vindicate their natural and legal rights, to break the yoke of tyranny, and free themselves and posterity from inglorious servitude and ruin.” Following Locke and “Cato,” Mayhew pointed out that there was little danger of revolution for trivial causes, for “mankind in general have a disposition to be... submissive and passive and tame under government....”

Mayhew also stressed every man’s right and duty of “private judgment,” basing this in turn on the nature of man: his capacity for reason and freedom of will to choose his course of action. And as criteria for choice, the individual had available to him knowledge of truth and Tightness rooted eternally in the “nature of things.”

The 1744 pamphlet of the Reverend Elisha Williams of Massachusetts,
The Essential Rights and Liberties...
, was also frankly Lockean throughout. Writes Williams: