The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 Read Online Free PDF Page A
Author: Robert Middlekauff
the poor. Men Walpole left office five years later, gin flowed as easily as ever. Hogarth Gin Lane ( 1751) provided a bleak picture of its effects on ordinary people in London. Parliament acted again soon after, with more success though with no more popular support. 9
Beneath these curious episodes involving naturalization, calendars, and gin was a powerful conservatism that suggests that they were in no way aberrations, but rather characteristic of the deepest instincts of the culture. The excesses of the seventeenth century -- antinomianism, fanaticism, and a bloody civil war -- had not left a legacy of moral weariness or social fatigue, but they had created a suspicion of inspiration, extravagance, and innovation -- especially, though not exclusively, in day-to-day behavior, religion, and politics. There were, of course, cranks and fanatics in England throughout the eighteenth century, and there were political radicals, but all these sorts were outsiders, butting their heads against a social order resistant to all but the familiar, the known, and the conventional.
For the English air was no longer full of ghosts and sprites, furies and fairies, witches and goblins. It did not nourish the prophets and sectarians who had sought to make the world over in the full tide of the Spirit a century earlier. The process of clearing the atmosphere had begun while it was still full of fancies, and while men still dreamed extravagant dreams of the New Jerusalem incarnate in England. The dreams had given some men the strength to cut off the head of Charles I and to establish a holy commonwealth. Inspired, others drew up marvelous plans for the new order. But in this heady atmosphere, still others
____________________
8
Dorothy Marshall, Eighteenth Century England ( New York, 1962), 222-23.
9
Ibid., 224-25.
shrank and drew back -- none with more skepticism toward romances and delusions than Thomas Hobbes.
Perhaps with more hope than realism it was Hobbes who, in 1651, consigned superstition to the past and who assumed that rationality distinguished the mind of his day. In the past, now happily departed according to Hobbes, men explained invisible agencies by calling up "a god, or a Divel." Their own mental quirks and events in nature which seemed inexplicable were explained, and men had "invoked also their own wit, by the name of Muses; their own ignorance, by the name of Fortune; their own lusts, by the name of Cupid, their own rage, by the name of Furies." 10
But such explanations had long since lost their power to persuade. Reason and light apparently governed the eighteenth century, along with the down-to-earth, the solid, the dependable, the commonsensical realities.
IV
The general understanding in the eighteenth century about the nature of government and what it should do reflected faithfully the bias of this conservative culture. There was nothing remotely resembling the present-day idea that government ought to promote the general welfare and the public interest. Of course eighteenth-century government was not hostile to these purposes, but something rather different -- much more limited -- was expected of it. Government existed to maintain "the king's peace," as the common law and ancient tradition had it. This notion implied more than keeping order, more than catching lawbreakers and punishing them; it involved taking action, or remaining inactive if that were necessary, to see that things went on pretty much as they always had. Maintaining the king's peace constituted the core of domestic policy; foreign policy ordinarily entailed the analogous provision for national security. In practice, the one abiding problem in foreign affairs before the American Revolution was the question of Hanover, which Britain had taken on when the first of the Georges was crowned.
All government was the king's. From the lowest official in the parish to the greatest minister, service undertaken was in the name of
Beneath these curious episodes involving naturalization, calendars, and gin was a powerful conservatism that suggests that they were in no way aberrations, but rather characteristic of the deepest instincts of the culture. The excesses of the seventeenth century -- antinomianism, fanaticism, and a bloody civil war -- had not left a legacy of moral weariness or social fatigue, but they had created a suspicion of inspiration, extravagance, and innovation -- especially, though not exclusively, in day-to-day behavior, religion, and politics. There were, of course, cranks and fanatics in England throughout the eighteenth century, and there were political radicals, but all these sorts were outsiders, butting their heads against a social order resistant to all but the familiar, the known, and the conventional.
For the English air was no longer full of ghosts and sprites, furies and fairies, witches and goblins. It did not nourish the prophets and sectarians who had sought to make the world over in the full tide of the Spirit a century earlier. The process of clearing the atmosphere had begun while it was still full of fancies, and while men still dreamed extravagant dreams of the New Jerusalem incarnate in England. The dreams had given some men the strength to cut off the head of Charles I and to establish a holy commonwealth. Inspired, others drew up marvelous plans for the new order. But in this heady atmosphere, still others
____________________
8
Dorothy Marshall, Eighteenth Century England ( New York, 1962), 222-23.
9
Ibid., 224-25.
shrank and drew back -- none with more skepticism toward romances and delusions than Thomas Hobbes.
Perhaps with more hope than realism it was Hobbes who, in 1651, consigned superstition to the past and who assumed that rationality distinguished the mind of his day. In the past, now happily departed according to Hobbes, men explained invisible agencies by calling up "a god, or a Divel." Their own mental quirks and events in nature which seemed inexplicable were explained, and men had "invoked also their own wit, by the name of Muses; their own ignorance, by the name of Fortune; their own lusts, by the name of Cupid, their own rage, by the name of Furies." 10
But such explanations had long since lost their power to persuade. Reason and light apparently governed the eighteenth century, along with the down-to-earth, the solid, the dependable, the commonsensical realities.
IV
The general understanding in the eighteenth century about the nature of government and what it should do reflected faithfully the bias of this conservative culture. There was nothing remotely resembling the present-day idea that government ought to promote the general welfare and the public interest. Of course eighteenth-century government was not hostile to these purposes, but something rather different -- much more limited -- was expected of it. Government existed to maintain "the king's peace," as the common law and ancient tradition had it. This notion implied more than keeping order, more than catching lawbreakers and punishing them; it involved taking action, or remaining inactive if that were necessary, to see that things went on pretty much as they always had. Maintaining the king's peace constituted the core of domestic policy; foreign policy ordinarily entailed the analogous provision for national security. In practice, the one abiding problem in foreign affairs before the American Revolution was the question of Hanover, which Britain had taken on when the first of the Georges was crowned.
All government was the king's. From the lowest official in the parish to the greatest minister, service undertaken was in the name of
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