Our Enemy, the State
Albert Jay Nock
[1935 / Part 4 of 7]
CHAPTER 3
In considering the State's development in America, it is important to
keep in mind the fact that America's experience of the State was
longer during the colonial period than during the period of American
independence; the period 1607-1776 was longer than the period
1776-1935. Moreover, the colonists came here full-grown, and had
already a considerable experience of the State in England and Europe
before they arrived; and for purposes of comparison, this would extend
the former period by a few years, say at least fifteen. It would
probably be safe to put it that the American colonists had twenty-five
years' longer experience of the State than citizens of the United
States have had.
Their experience, too, was not only longer, but more varied. The
British State, the French, Dutch, Swedish and Spanish States, were all
established here. The separatist English dissenters who landed at
Plymouth had lived under the Dutch State as well as under the British
State. When James I made England too uncomfortable for them to live
in, they went to Holland; and many of the institutions which they
subsequently set up in New England, and which were later incorporated
into the general body of what we call "American institutions,"
were actually Dutch, though commonly - almost invariably - we accredit
them to England. They were for the most part Roman-Continental in
their origin, but they were transmitted here from Holland, not from
England.[1] No such institutions existed in England at that time, and
hence the Plymouth colonists could not have seen them there; they
could have seen them only in Holland, where they did exist.
Our colonial period coincided with the period of revolution and
readjustment in England, referred to in the preceding chapter, when
the British merchant-State was displacing the feudal State,
consolidating its own position, and shifting the incidence of economic
exploitation. These revolutionary measures gave rise to an extensive
review of the general theory on which the feudal State had been
operating. The earlier Stuarts governed on the theory of monarchy by
divine right. The State's economic beneficiaries were answerable only
to the monarch, who was theoretically answerable only to God; he had
no responsibilities to society at large, save such as he chose to
incur, and these only for the duration of his pleasure. In 1607, the
year of the Virginia colony's landing at Jamestown, John Cowell,
regius professor of civil law at the University of Cambridge, laid
down the doctrine that the monarch "is above the law by his
absolute power, and though for the better and equal course in making
laws he do admit the Three Estates unto Council, yet this in divers
learned men's opinions is not of constraint, but of his own benignity,
or by reason of the promise made upon oath at the time of his
coronation."
This doctrine, which was elaborated to the utmost in the
extraordinary work called
Patriarcha, by Sir Robert Filmer, was all well enough so long
as the line of society's stratification was clear, straight and easily
drawn. The feudal State's economic beneficiaries were virtually a
close corporation, a compact body consisting of a Church hierarchy and
a titled group of hereditary, large-holding landed proprietors. In
respect of interests, this body was extremely homogeneous, and their
interests, few in number, were simple in character and easily defined.
With the monarch, the hierarchy, and a small, closely-limited nobility
above the line of stratification, and an undifferentiated populace
below it, this theory of sovereignty was passable; it answered the
purposes of the feudal State as well as any.
But the practical outcome of this theory did not, and could not, suit
the purposes of the rapidly-growing class of merchants and financiers.
They wished to introduce a new economic system. Under feudalism,
production had been, as a general thing, for use, with the incidence
of exploitation falling largely on a peasantry. The State had by no
means always kept its hands off trade, but it had never countenanced
the idea that its chief reason for existence was, as we say, "to
help business." The merchants and financiers, however, had
precisely this idea in mind. They saw the attractive possibilities of
production for profit, with the incidence of exploitation gradually
shifting to an industrial proletariat. They saw also, however, that to
realize all these possibilities, they must get the State's mechanism
to working as smoothly and powerfully on the side of "business"
as it had been working on the side of the monarchy, the Church, and
the large-holding landed proprietors. This meant capturing control of
this mechanism, and so altering and adapting it as to give themselves
the same free access to the political means as was enjoyed by the
displaced beneficiaries. The course by which they accomplished this is
marked by the Civil War, the dethronement and execution of Charles I,
the Puritan protectorate, and the revolution of 1688.
This is the actual inwardness of what is known as the Puritan
movement in England. It had a quasi-religious motivation - speaking
strictly, an ecclesiological motivation - but the paramount practical
end towards which it tended was a repartition of access to the
political means. It is a significant fact, though seldom noticed, that
the only tenet with which Puritanism managed to evangelize equally the
non-Christian and Christian world of English-bred civilization is its
tenet of work, its doctrine that work is, by God's express will and
command, a duty; indeed almost, if not quite, the first and most
important of man's secular duties. This erection of labour into a
Christian virtue per se, this investment of work with
a special religious sanction, was an invention of Puritanism; it was
something never heard of in England before the rise of the Puritan
State. The only doctrine antedating it presented labour as the means
to a purely secular end; as Cranmer's divines put it, "that I may
learn and labour truly to get mine own living." There is no hint
that God would take it amiss if one preferred to do little work and
put up with a poor living, for the sake of doing something else with
one's time. Perhaps the best witness to the essential character of the
Puritan movement in England and America is the thoroughness with which
its doctrine of work has pervaded both literatures, all the way from
Cromwell's letters to Carlyle's panegyric and Longfellow's verse.
But the merchant-State of the Puritans was like any other; it
followed the standard pattern. It originated in conquest and
confiscation, like the feudal State which it displaced; the only
difference being that its conquest was by civil war instead of foreign
war. Its object was the economic exploitation of one class by another;
for the exploitation of feudal serfs by a nobility, it proposed only
to substitute the exploitation of a proletariat by enterprisers. Like
its predecessor, the merchant-State was purely an organization of the
political means, a machine for the distribution of economic advantage,
but with its mechanism adapted to the requirements of a more numerous
and more highly differentiated order of beneficiaries; a class,
moreover, whose numbers were not limited by heredity or by the sheer
arbitrary pleasure of a monarch.
The process of establishing the merchant-State, however, necessarily
brought about changes in the general theory of sovereignty. The bald
doctrine of Cowell and Filmer was no longer practicable; yet any new
theory had to find room for some sort of divine sanction, for the
habit of men's minds does not change suddenly, and Puritanism's
alliance between religious and secular interests was extremely close.
One may not quite put it that the merchant-enterprisers made use of
religious fanaticism to pull their chestnuts out of the fire; the
religionists had sound and good chestnuts of their own to look after.
They had plenty of rabid nonsense to answer for, plenty of sour
hypocrisy, plenty of vicious fanaticism; whenever we think of
seventeenth-century British Puritanism, we think of Hugh Peters, of
Praise-God Barebones, of Cromwell's iconoclasts "smashing the
mighty big angels in glass." But behind all this untowardness
there was in the religionists a body of sound conscience, soundly and
justly outraged; and no doubt, though mixed with an intolerable deal
of unscrupulous greed, there was on the part of the
merchant-enterprisers a sincere persuasion that what was good for
business was good for society. Taking Hampden's conscience as
representative, one would say that it operated under the limitations
set by nature upon the typical sturdy Buckinghamshire squire; the
mercantile conscience was likewise ill-informed, and likewise set its
course with a hard, dogged, provincial stubbornness. Still, the
alliance of the two bodies of conscience was not without some measure
of respectability. No doubt, for example, Hampden regarded the
State-controlled episcopate to some extent objectively, as
unscriptural in theory, and a tool of Antichrist in practice; and no
doubt, too, the mercantile conscience, with the disturbing vision of
William Laud in view, might have found State-managed episcopacy
objectionable on other grounds than those of special interest.
The merchant-State's political rationale had to respond to the
pressure of a growing individualism. The spirit of individualism
appeared in the latter half of the sixteenth century; probably - as
well as such obscure origins can be determined - as a by-product of
the Continental revival of learning, or, it may be, specifically as a
by-product of the Reformation in Germany. It was long, however, in
gaining force enough to make itself count in shaping political theory.
The feudal State could take no account of this spirit; its stark régime
of status was operable only where there was no great multiplicity of
diverse economic interests to be accommodated, and where the sum of
social power remained practically stable. Under the British feudal
State, one large-holding landed proprietor's interest was much like
another's, and one bishop's or clergyman's interest was about the same
in kind as another's. The interests of the monarchy and court were not
greatly diversified, and the sum of social power varied but little
from time to time. Hence an economic class-solidarity was easily
maintained; access upward from one class to the other was easily
blocked, so easily that very few positive State-interventions were
necessary to keep people, as we say, in their place; or as Cranmer's
divines put it, to keep them doing their duty in that station of life
unto which it had pleased God to call them. Thus the State could
accomplish its primary purpose, and still afford to remain relatively
weak. It could normally, that is, enable a thorough-going economic
exploitation with relatively little apparatus of legislation or of
personnel.[2]
The merchant-State, on the other hand, with its ensuing régime
of contract, had to meet the problem set by a rapid development of
social power, and a multiplicity of economic interests. Both these
tended to foster and stimulate the spirit of individualism. The
management of social power made the merchant-enterpriser feel that he
was quite as much somebody as anybody, and that the general order of
interest which he represented - and in particular his own special
fraction of that interest - was to be regarded as most respectable,
which hitherto it had not been. In short, he had a full sense of
himself as an individual, which on these grounds he could of course
justify beyond peradventure. The aristocratic disparagement of his
pursuits, and the consequent stigma of inferiority which had been so
long fixed upon the "base mechanical," exacerbated this
sense, and rendered it at its best assertive, and at its worst,
disposed to exaggerate the characteristic defects of his class as well
as its excellences, and lump them off together in a new category of
social virtues - its hardness, ruthlessness, ignorance and vulgarity
at par with its commercial integrity, its shrewdness, diligence and
thrift. Thus the fully-developed composite type of
merchant-enterpriser-financier might be said to run all the
psychological gradations between the brothers Cheeryble at one end of
the scale, and Mr. Gradgrind, Sir Gorgius Midas and Mr. Bottles at the
other.
This individualism fostered the formulation of certain doctrines
which in one shape or another found their way into the official
political philosophy of the merchant-State. Foremost among these were
the two which the Declaration of Independence lays down as
fundamental, the doctrine of natural rights and the doctrine of
popular sovereignty. In a generation which had exchanged the authority
of a pope for the authority of a book - or rather, the authority of
unlimited private interpretation of a book - there was no difficulty
about finding ample Scriptural sanction for both these doctrines. The
interpretation of the Bible, like the judicial interpretation of a
constitution, is merely a process by which, as a contemporary of
Bishop Butler said, anything may be made to mean anything; and in the
absence of a coercive authority, papal, conciliar or judicial, any
given interpretation finds only such acceptance as may, for whatever
reason, be accorded it. Thus the episode of Eden, the parable of the
talents, the Apostolic injunction against being "slothful in
business," were a warrant for the Puritan doctrine of work; they
brought the sanction of Scripture and the sanction of economic
interest into complete agreement, uniting the religionist and the
merchant-enterpriser in the bond of a common intention. Thus, again,
the view of man as made in the image of God, made only a little lower
than the angels, the subject of so august a transaction as the
Atonement, quite corroborated the political doctrine of his endowment
by his Creator with certain rights unalienable by Church or State.
While the merchant-enterpriser might hold with Mr. Jefferson that the
truth of this political doctrine is self-evident, its Scriptural
support was yet of great value as carrying an implication of human
nature's dignity which braced his more or less diffident and
self-conscious individualism; and the doctrine that so dignified him
might easily be conceived of as dignifying his pursuits. Indeed, the
Bible's indorsement of the doctrine of labour and the doctrine of
natural rights was really his charter for rehabilitating "trade"
against the disparagement that the régime of status had put
upon it, and for investing it with the most brilliant lustre of
respectability.
In the same way, the doctrine of popular sovereignty could be mounted
on impregnable Scriptural ground. Civil society was an association of
true believers functioning for common secular purposes; and its right
of self-government with respect to these purposes was God-given. If on
the religious side all believers were priests, then on the secular
side they were all sovereigns; the notion of an intervening jure
divino monarch was as repugnant to Scripture as that of an
intervening jure divino pope - witness the Israelite
commonwealth upon which monarchy was visited as explicitly a
punishment for sin. Civil legislation was supposed to interpret and
particularize the laws of God as revealed in the Bible, and its
administrators were responsible to the congregation in both its
religious and secular capacities. Where the revealed law was silent,
legislation was to be guided by its general spirit, as best this might
be determined. These principles obviously left open a considerable
area of choice; but hypothetically the range of civil liberty and the
range of religious liberty had a common boundary.
This religious sanction of popular sovereignty was agreeable to the
merchant-enterpriser; it fell in well with his individualism,
enhancing considerably his sense of personal dignity and consequence.
He could regard himself as by birthright not only a free citizen of a
heavenly commonwealth, but also a free elector in an earthly
commonwealth fashioned, as nearly as might be, after the heavenly
pattern. The range of liberty permitted him in both qualities was
satisfactory; he could summon warrant of Scripture to cover his
undertakings both here and hereafter. As far as this present world's
concerns went, his doctrine of labour was Scriptural, his doctrine of
master-and-servant was Scriptural - even bond-service, even
chattel-service was Scriptural; his doctrine of a wage-economy, of
money-lending - again the parable of the talents - both were
Scriptural. What especially recommended the doctrine of popular
sovereignty to him on its secular side, however, was the immense
leverage it gave for ousting the régime of status to make way
for the régime of contract; in a word, for displacing the
feudal State and bringing in the merchant-State.
But interesting as these two doctrines were, their actual application
was a matter of great difficulty. On the religious side, the doctrine
of natural rights had to take account of the unorthodox. Theoretically
it was easy to dispose of them. The separatists, for example, such as
those who manned the Mayflower, had lost their natural rights
in the fall of Adam, and had never made use of the means appointed to
reclaim them. This was all very well, but the logical extension of
this principle into actual practice was a rather grave affair. There
were a good many dissenters, all told, and they were articulate on the
matter of natural rights, which made trouble; so that when all was
said and done, the doctrine came out considerably compromised. Then,
in respect of popular sovereignty, there were the Presbyterians.
Calvinism was monocratic to the core; in fact, Presbyterianism existed
side by side with episcopacy in the Church of England in the sixteenth
century, and was nudged out only very gradually.[3] They were a
numerous body, and in point of Scripture and history they had a great
deal to say for their position. Thus the practical task of organizing
a spiritual commonwealth had as hard going with the logic of popular
sovereignty as it had with the logic of natural rights.
The task of secular organization was even more troublesome. A society
organized in conformity to these two principles is easily conceivable
- such an organization as Paine and the Declaration contemplated, for
example, arising out of social agreement, and concerning itself only
with the maintenance of freedom and security for the individual - but
the practical task of effecting such an organization is quite another
matter. On general grounds, doubtless, the Puritans would have found
this impracticable; if, indeed, the times are ever to be ripe for
anything of the kind, their times were certainly not. The particular
round of difficulty, however, was that the merchant-enterpriser did
not want that form of social organization; in fact, one can not be
sure that the Puritan religionists themselves wanted it. The
root-trouble was, in short, that there was no practicable way to avert
a shattering collision between the logic of natural rights and
popular sovereignty, and the economic law that man tends always to
satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion.
This law governed the merchant-enterpriser in common with the rest of
mankind. He was not for an organization that should do no more than
maintain freedom and security; he was for one that should redistribute
access to the political means, and concern itself with freedom and
security only so far as would be consistent with keeping this access
open. That is to say, he was thoroughly indisposed to the idea of
government; he was quite as strong for the idea of the State as the
hierarchy and nobility were. He was not for any essential
transformation in the State's character, but merely for a repartition
of the economic advantages that the State confers.
Thus the merchant-polity amounted to an attempt, more or less
disingenuous, at reconciling matters which in their nature can not be
reconciled. The ideas of natural rights and popular sovereignty were,
as we have seen, highly acceptable and highly animating to all the
forces allied against the feudal idea; but while these ideas might be
easily reconcilable with a system of simple government, such a system
would not answer the purpose. Only the State-system would do that. The
problem therefore was, how to keep these ideas well in the forefront
of political theory, and at the same time prevent their practical
application from undermining the organization of the political means.
It was a difficult problem. The best that could be done with it was by
making certain structural alterations in the State, which would give
it the appearance of expressing these ideas, without the reality. The
most important of these structural changes was that of bringing in the
so-called representative or parliamentary system, which Puritanism
introduced into the modern world, and which has received a great deal
of praise as an advance towards democracy. This praise, however, is
exaggerated. The change was one of form only, and its bearing on
democracy has been inconsiderable.[4]
II
The migration of Englishmen to America merely transferred this
problem into another setting. The discussion of political theory went
on vigorously, but the philosophy of natural rights and popular
sovereignty came out in practice about where they had come out in
England. Here again a great deal has been made of the democratic
spirit and temper of the migrants, especially in the case of the
separatists who landed at Plymouth, but the facts do not bear it out,
except with regard to the decentralizing congregationalist principle
of church order. This principle of lodging final authority in the
smallest unit rather than the largest - in the local congregation
rather than in a synod or general council - was democratic, and its
thorough-going application in a scheme of church order would represent
some actual advance towards democracy, and give some recognition to
the general philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty. The
Plymouth settlers did something with this principle, actually applying
it in the matter of church order, and for this they deserve credit.[5]
Applying it in the matter of civil order, however, was another affair.
It is true that the Plymouth colonists probably contemplated something
of the kind, and that for a time they practised a sort of primitive
communism. They drew up an agreement on shipboard which may be taken
at its face value as evidence of their democratic disposition, though
it was not in any sense a "frame of government," like
Penn's, or any kind of constitutional document. Those who speak of it
as our first written constitution are considerably in advance of their
text, for it was merely an agreement to make a constitution or "frame
of government" when the settlers should have come to land and
looked the situation over. One sees that it could hardly have been
more than this - indeed, that the proposed constitution itself could
be no more than provisional - when it is remembered that these
migrants were not their own men. They did not sail on their own, nor
were they headed for any unpreëmpted territory on which they
might establish a squatter sovereignty and set up any kind of civil
order they saw fit. They were headed for Virginia, to settle in the
jurisdiction of a company of English merchant-enterprisers, now
growing shaky, and soon to be superseded by the royal authority, and
its territory converted into a royal province. It was only by
misreckonings and the accidents of navigation that, most unfortunately
for the prospects of the colony, the settlers landed on the stern and
rockbound coast of Plymouth.
These settlers were in most respects probably as good as the best who
ever found their way to America. They were bred of what passed in
England as "the lower orders," sober, hard-working and
capable, and their residence under Continental institutions in Holland
had given them a fund of politico-religious ideas and habits of
thought which set them considerably apart from the rest of their
countrymen. There is, however, no more than an antiquarian interest in
determining how far they were actually possessed by those ideas. They
may have contemplated a system of complete religious and civil
democracy, or they may not. They may have found their communist
practices agreeable to their notion of a sound and just social order,
or they may not. The point is that while apparently they might be free
enough to found a church order as democratic as they chose, they were
by no means free to found a civil democracy, or anything remotely
resembling one, because they were in bondage to the will of an English
trading-company. Even their religious freedom was permissive; the
London company simply cared nothing about that. The same
considerations governed their communistic practices; whether or not
these practices suited their ideas, they were obliged to adopt them.
Their agreement with the London merchant-enterprisers bound them, in
return for transportation and outfit, to seven years' service, during
which time they should work on a system of common-land tillage, store
their produce in a common warehouse, and draw their maintenance from
these common stores. Thus whether or not they were communists in
principle, their actual practice of communism was by prescription.
The fundamental fact to be observed in any survey of the American
State's initial development is the one whose importance was first
remarked, I believe, by Mr. Beard; that the trading-company - the
commercial corporation for colonization - was actually an autonomous
State. "Like the State," says Mr. Beard, "it had a
constitution, a charter issued by the Crown . . . like the State, it
had a territorial basis, a grant of land often greater in area than a
score of European principalities . . . it could make assessments, coin
money, regulate trade, dispose of corporate property, collect taxes,
manage a treasury, and provide for defense. Thus" - and here is
the important observation, so important that I venture to italicize it
-
"every essential element long afterward found in the
government of the American State appeared in the chartered corporation
that started English civilization in America." Generally
speaking, the system of civil order established in America was the
State-system of the "mother countries" operating over a
considerable body of water; the only thing that distinguished it was
that the exploited and dependent class was situated at an unusual
distance from the owning and exploiting class. The headquarters of the
autonomous State were on one side of the Atlantic, and its subjects on
the other.
This separation gave rise to administrative difficulties of one kind
and another; and to obviate them - perhaps for other reasons as well -
one English company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, moved over bodily
in 1630, bringing their charter and most of their stock-holders with
them, thus setting up an actual autonomous State in America. The thing
to be observed about this is that the merchant-State was set up
complete in New England long before it was set up in Old England. Most
of the English immigrants to Massachusetts came over between 1630 and
1640; and in this period the English merchant-State was only at the
beginning of its hardest struggles for supremacy. James I died in
1625, and his successor, Charles I, continued his absolutist régime.
From 1629, the year in which the Bay Company was chartered, to 1640,
when the Long Parliament was called, he ruled without a parliament,
effectively suppressing what few vestiges of liberty had survived the
Tudor and Jacobean tyrannies; and during these eleven years the
prospects of the English merchant-State were at their lowest.[6] It
still had to face the distractions of the Civil War, the retarding
anomalies of the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the recurrence of
tyrannical absolutism under James II, before it succeeded in
establishing itself firmly through the revolution of 1688.
On the other hand, the leaders of the Bay Colony were free from the
first to establish a State-policy of their own devising, and to set up
a State-structure which should express that policy without compromise.
There was no competing policy to extinguish, no rival structure to
refashion. Thus the merchant-State came into being in a clear field a
full half-century before it attained supremacy in England. Competition
of any kind, or the possibility of competition, it has never had. A
point of greatest importance to remember is that the merchant-State is
the only form of the State that ever existed in America. Whether under
the rule of a trading-company or a provincial governor or a republican
representative legislature, Americans have never known any other form
of the State. In this respect the Massachusetts Bay colony is
differentiated only as being the first autonomous State ever
established in America, and as furnishing the most complete and
convenient example for purposes of study. In principle it was not
differentiated. The State in New England, Virginia, Maryland, the
Jerseys, New York, Connecticut, everywhere, was purely a class-State,
with control of the political means reposing in the hands of what we
now style, in a general way, the "business-man."
In the eleven years of Charles's tyrannical absolutism, English
immigrants came over to join the Bay colony, at the rate of about two
thousand a year. No doubt at the outset some of the colonists had the
idea of becoming agricultural specialists, as in Virginia, and of
maintaining certain vestiges, or rather imitations, of semi-feudal
social practice, such as were possible under that form of industry
when operated by a slave-economy or a tenant-economy. This, however,
proved impracticable; the climate and soil of New England were against
it. A tenant-economy was precarious, for rather than work for a
master, the immigrant agriculturist naturally preferred to push out
into unpreëmpted land, and work for himself; in other words, as
Turgôt, Marx, Hertzka, and many others have shown, he could not
be exploited until he had been expropriated from the land. The long
and hard winters took the profit out of slave-labour in agriculture.
The Bay colonists experimented with it, however, even attempting to
enslave the Indians, which they found could not be done, for the
reasons that I have already noticed. In default of this, the colonists
carried out the primitive technique by resorting to extermination,
their ruthless ferocity being equalled only by that of the Virginia
colonists.[7] They held some slaves, and did a great deal of
slave-trading; but in the main, they became at the outset a race of
small freeholding farmers, shipbuilders, navigators, maritime
enterprisers in fish, whales, molasses, rum, and miscellaneous
cargoes; and presently, moneylenders. Their remarkable success in
these pursuits is well known; it is worth mention here in order to
account for many of the complications and collisions of interest
subsequently ensuing upon the merchant-State's fundamental doctrine
that the primary function of government is not to maintain freedom and
security, but to "help business."
III
One examines the American merchant-State in vain for any suggestion
of the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty. The
company-system and the provincial system made no place for it, and the
one autonomous State was uncompromisingly against it. The Bay Company
brought over their charter to serve as the constitution of the new
colony, and under its provisions the form of the State was that of an
uncommonly small and close oligarchy. The right to vote was vested
only in shareholding members, or "freemen" of the
corporation, on the stark State principle laid down many years later
by John Jay, that "those who own the country should govern the
country." At the end of a year, the Bay colony comprised perhaps
about two thousand persons; and of these, certainly not twenty,
probably not more than a dozen, had anything whatever to say about its
government. This small group constituted itself as a sort of
directorate or council, appointing its own executive body, which
consisted of a governor, a lieutenant-governor, and a half-dozen or
more magistrates. These officials had no responsibility to the
community at large, but only to the directorate. By the terms of the
charter, the directorate was self-perpetuating. It was permitted to
fill vacancies and add to its numbers as it saw fit; and in so doing
it followed a policy similar to that which was subsequently
recommended by Alexander Hamilton, of admitting only such well-to-do
and influential persons as could be trusted to sustain a solid front
against anything savouring of popular sovereignty.
Historians have very properly made a great deal of the influence of
Calvinist theology in bracing the strongly anti-democratic attitude of
the Bay Company. The story is readable and interesting - often amusing
- yet the gist of it is so simple that it can be perceived at once.
The company's principle of action was in this respect the one that in
like circumstances has for a dozen centuries invariably motivated the
State. The Marxian dictum that "religion is the opiate of the
people" is either an ignorant or a slovenly confusion of terms,
which can not be too strongly reprehended. Religion was never that,
nor will it ever be; but organized Christianity, which is by no means
the same thing as religion, has been the opiate of the people ever
since the beginning of the fourth century, and never has this opiate
been employed for political purposes more skilfully than it was by the
Massachusetts Bay oligarchy.
In the year 311 the Roman emperor Constantine issued an edict of
toleration in favour of organized Christianity. He patronized the new
cult heavily, giving it rich presents, and even adopted the labarum as
his standard, which was a most distinguished gesture, and cost
nothing; the story of the heavenly sign appearing before his crucial
battle against Maxentius may quite safely be put down beside that of
the apparitions seen before the battle of the Marne. He never joined
the Church, however, and the tradition that he was converted to
Christianity is open to great doubt. The point of all this is that
circumstances had by that time made Christianity a considerable
figure; it had survived contumely and persecution, and had become a
social influence which Constantine saw was destined to reach far
enough to make it worth courting. The Church could be made a most
effective tool of the State, and only a very moderate amount of
statesmanship was needed to discern the right way of bringing this
about. The understanding, undoubtedly tacit, was based on a simple
quid pro quo; in exchange for imperial recognition and
patronage, and endowments enough to keep up to the requirements of a
high official respectability, the Church should quit its disagreeable
habit of criticizing the course of politics; and in particular, it
should abstain from unfavourable comment on the State's administration
of the political means.
These are the unvarying terms - again I say, undoubtedly tacit, as it
is seldom necessary to stipulate against biting the hand by which one
is fed - of every understanding that has been struck since
Constantine's day, between organized Christianity and the State. They
were the terms of the understanding struck in the Germanies and in
England at the Reformation. The petty German principality had its
State Church as it had its State theatre; and in England, Henry VIII
set up the Church in its present status as an arm of the civil
service, like the Post-office. The fundamental understanding in all
cases was that the Church should not interfere with or disparage the
organization of the political means; and in practice it naturally
followed that the Church would go further, and quite regularly abet
this organization to the best of its ability.
The merchant-State in America came to this understanding with
organized Christianity. In the Bay colony the Church became in 1638 an
established subsidiary of the State,[8] supported by taxation; it
maintained a State creed, promulgated in 1647. In some other colonies
also, as for example, in Virginia, the Church was a branch of the
State service, and where it was not actually established as such, the
same understanding was reached by other means, quite as satisfactory.
Indeed, the merchant-State both in England and America soon became
lukewarm towards the idea of an Establishment, perceiving that the
same modus vivendi could be almost as easily arrived at under
voluntaryism, and that the latter had the advantage of satisfying
practically all modes of credal and ceremonial preference, thus
releasing the State from the troublesome and profitless business of
interference in disputes over matters of doctrine and Church order.
Voluntaryism pure and simple was set up in Rhode Island by Roger
Williams, John Clarke, and their associates who were banished from the
Bay colony almost exactly three hundred years ago, in 1636. This group
of exiles is commonly regarded as having founded a society on the
philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty in respect of
both Church order and civil order, and as having launched an
experiment in democracy. This, however, is an exaggeration. The
leaders of the group were undoubtedly in sight of this philosophy, and
as far as Church order is concerned, their practice was conformable to
it. On the civil side, the most that can be said is that their
practice was conformable in so far as they knew how to make it so; and
one says this much only by a very considerable concession. The least
that can be said, on the other hand, is that their practice was for a
time greatly in advance of the practice prevailing in other colonies -
so far in advance that Rhode Island was in great disrepute with its
neighbours in Massachusetts and Connecticut, who diligently
disseminated the tale of its evil fame throughout the land, with the
customary exaggerations and embellishments. Nevertheless, through
acceptance of the State system of land-tenure, the political structure
of Rhode Island was a State-structure from the outset, contemplating
as it did the stratification of society into an owning and exploiting
class and a propertyless dependent class. Williams's theory of the
State was that of social compact arrived at among equals, but equality
did not exist in Rhode Island; the actual outcome was a pure
class-State.
In the spring of 1638, Williams acquired about twenty square miles of
land by gift from two Indian sachems, in addition to some he had
bought from them two years before. In October he formed a "proprietary"
of purchasers who bought twelve-thirteenths of the Indian grant.
Bicknell, in his history of Rhode Island, cites a letter written by
Williams to the deputy-governor of the Bay colony, which says frankly
that the plan of this proprietary contemplated the creation of two
classes of citizens, one consisting of landholding heads of families,
and the other, of "young men, single persons" who were a
landless tenantry, and as Bicknell says, "had no voice or vote as
to the officers of the community, or the laws which they were called
upon to obey." Thus the civil order in Rhode Island was
essentially a pure State order, as much so as the civil order of the
Bay colony, or any other in America; and in fact the landed-property
franchise lasted uncommonly long in Rhode Island, existing there for
some time after it had been given up in most other quarters of
America.[9] By way of summing up, it is enough to say that nowhere in
the American colonial civil order was there ever the trace of a
democracy. The political structure was always that of the
merchant-State; Americans have never known any other. Furthermore, the
philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty was never once
exhibited anywhere in American political practice during the colonial
period, from the first settlement in 1607 down to the revolution of
1776.
Footnotes to Chapter 3
- Among these institutions are:
our system of free public education; local self-government as
originally established in the township system; our method of
conveying land; almost all of our system of equity; much of our
criminal code; and our method of administering estates.
- Throughout Europe, indeed, up
to the close of the eighteenth century, the State was quite weak,
even considering the relatively moderate development of social
power, and the moderate amount of economic accumulation available
to its predatory purposes. Social power in modern France could pay
the flat annual levy of Louis XIV's taxes without feeling it, and
would like nothing better than to commute the republican State's
levy on those terms.
- During the reign of Elizabeth
the Puritan contention, led by Cartwright, was for what amounted
to a theory of jure divino Presbyterianism. The
Establishment at large took the position of Archbishop Whitgift
and Richard Hooker that the details of church polity were
indifferent, and therefore properly subject to State regulation.
The High Church doctrine of jure divino episcopacy
was laid down later, by Whitgift's successor, Bancroft. Thus up to
1604 the Presbyterians were objectionable on secular grounds, and
afterwards on both secular and ecclesiastical grounds.
- So were the kaleidoscopic
changes that took place in France after the revolution of 1789.
Throughout the Directorate, the Consulship, the Restoration, the
two Empires, the three Republics and the Commune, the French State
kept its essential character intact; it remained always the
organization of the political means.
- In 1629 the Massachusetts Bay
colony adopted the Plymouth colony's model of congregational
autonomy, but finding its principle dangerously inconsistent with
the principle of the State, almost immediately nullified their
action; retaining, however, the name of Congregationalism. This
mode of masquerade is easily recognizable as one of the modern
State's most useful expedients for maintaining the appearance of
things without the reality. The names of our two largest political
parties will at once appear as a capital example. Within two years
the Bay colony had set up a State church, nominally
congregationalist, but actually a branch of the civil service, as
in England.
- Probably it was a forecast of
this state of things, as much as the greater convenience of
administration, that caused the Bay Company to move over to
Massachusetts, bag and baggage, in the year following the issuance
of their charter.
- Thomas Robinson Hazard, the
Rhode Island Quaker, in his delightful Jonnycake Papers,
says that the Great Swamp Fight of 1675 was "instigated
against the rightful owners of the soil, solely by the cussed
godly Puritans of Massachusetts, and their hell- hound allies, the
Presbyterians of Connecticut; whom, though charity is my
specialty, I can never think of without feeling as all good Rhode
Islanders should, . . . and as old Miss Hazard did when in like
vein she thanked God in the Conanicut prayer-meeting that she
could hold malice forty years." The Rhode Island settlers
dealt with the Indians for rights in land, and made friends with
them.
- Mr. Parrington (Main
Currents in American Thought, vol. I, p. 24) cites the
successive steps leading up to this, as follows: the law of 1631,
restricting the franchise to Church members; of 1635, obliging all
persons to attend Church services; and of 1636, which established
a virtual State monopoly, by requiring consent of both Church and
State authority before a new church could be set up. Roger
Williams observed acutely that a State establishment of organized
Christianity is "a politic invention of man to maintain the
civil State."
- Bicknell says that the
formation of Williams's proprietary was "a landholding,
land-jobbing, land-selling scheme, with no moral, social, civil,
educational or religious end in view"; and his discussion of
the early land-allotments on the site where the city of Providence
now stands, makes it pretty clear that "the first years of
Providence are consumed in a greedy scramble for land."
Bicknell is not precisely an unfriendly witness towards Williams,
though his history is avowedly ex parte for the
thesis that the true expounder of civil freedom in Rhode Island
was not Williams, but Clarke. This contention is immaterial to the
present purpose, however, for the State system of land-tenure
prevailed in Clarke's settlements on Aquidneck as it did in
Williams's settlements farther up the bay.
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