Keeping the Colonies
Peoples of another culture or region will not long tolerate a Government that uses guns and soldiers to secure their obedience.
1720-1723
King George I 1714-1727
Peoples of another culture or region will not long tolerate a Government that uses guns and soldiers to secure their obedience.
1720-1723
King George I 1714-1727
By the 1720s, there were already rumblings of discontent coming from England’s American colonies, but John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon warned against strictness from London. When government of a distant or culturally different people falls to your lot, the only way to keep them on side is to give them a mutually satisfactory degree of freedom and self-determination.
original spelling
MEN will think it hard to work, toil, and run Hazards, for the Advantage of others any longer than they find their own interest in it, and especially for those who use them ill: All Nature points out that Course: No Creature sucks the Teats of their Dams longer than they they can draw Milk from thence, or can provide themselves with better Food: Nor will any Country continue their Subjection to another, only because their Great-Grandmothers were acquainted.
This is the Course of Humane Affairs;* and all wise States will always have it before their Eyes; and will well consider therefore how to preserve the Advantages arising from Colonies, and avoid the Evils. And I conceive there can be but two Ways in Nature to hinder them from throwing off their Dependence: The one to keep it out of their Power, and the other out of their Will. The first must be by Force; and the latter by using them well, and keeping them employ’d in such Productions, and making such Manufactures, as will support themselves and Families comfortably, and get Wealth too, or at least not prejudice their Mother-Country.
original spelling
* That is, human affairs. In the eighteenth century ‘humane’ was still used interchangeably with ‘human’ in regard to meaning. As the century progressed, ‘humane’ became restricted to the sense of ‘kindly, compassionate’.
1. What are the authors aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the authors communicate their ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.