Empire by Edward Cline

Author:Edward Cline [Cline, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781596929463
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 2006-10-29T18:30:00+00:00

PART II

Chapter 1: The Flambeaux

On March 8th, the House of Lords passed the Stamp Act without amendment or dissent. On the 22nd, George the Third, indisposed with illness, assented by commission the Act, which was to go into effect the following November. Two more acts, passed in May, also received his assent: the American Mutiny or Quartering Act, which required colonial legislatures to provide the army, without charge, with barracks, housing, and necessities; and the American Trade Act, which added more enumerated items to the Revenue Act of 1764, but granted the colonials leave to send iron and lumber as ballast and product to Ireland without duty. George had protested, and pressured George Grenville to revise, a stipulation in the original Quartering Act that soldiers and offices could be billeted in private homes; inns, ordinaries, taverns, and outbuildings such as barns were substituted instead, even though these, too, were private property. George sensed that such a requirement would surely rile his subjects and lead to unpleasantness. But a man who merely senses potential difficulties without further probing the cause of his uneasiness remains essentially blind to their fundamental causes. In this respect, George the Third was no more enlightened than was George Grenville.

The unpleasantness was to be caused by another thing altogether. News of the two additional acts did not reach the colonies until long after that of the Stamp Act. Beginning in April, candles of awareness sprang up in fits and starts in every North American colony, lit by men who acted as flambeaux: moral men, thoughtful men, well-read men, selfish men, men anxious about what loomed on the horizons of their lives; men who, like Thomas Paine, were also in search of a reasonable ethic. The flambeaux of any liberal society are its thinkers, its intellectuals, men who concern themselves with the causes and character of their civilization. They can transmit the received wisdom of their age, or refine it, or become independent of it and found new schools of thought. They can sustain their society, or call for its prudent alteration, or lead it to tyranny. They can revolt against incipient tyranny, or rebel against it, or acquiesce.

To rebel and to revolt are not synonymous actions. To rebel is to protest a power, campaign to exact certain concessions from it, fail or succeed in the effort, but in the end leave the power intact with greater or reduced legitimacy. To revolt is to throw off that power and replace it with one compatible with one’s ends.

The flambeaux of the colonies were rebels. They did not wish to overthrow Parliament or abolish the monarchy; they could not conceive of a better polity than the one that existed. When they examined the politics of Spain, France, Germany, and even the Netherlands, they counted themselves fortunate. They merely wished to be left alone to live and prosper under the shield of Britannia. But they were not willing to become slaves. They and the candles they lit were men who were,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.