The British Parliament 133
the upper house was clearly thought of as an estate, sitting in its own right, and
dependent neither on royal appointment nor on election except by its own body.
The Canada Act of 1791 carried the same ideas further. For each of the provinces
of Upper and Lower Canada it created a council whose members sat for life. The
act empowered His Majesty to confer on these councillors the hereditary right to
be summoned, and even to grant them hereditary titles; the purpose was to build
up a kind of nobility among the descendants of the first councillors; and though
nothing came of the idea, through lack of enthusiasm for nobility in Canada, the
terms of the Canada Act yet show the preponderance of thought on the subject
among the British governing class in 1791. It was the characteristic eighteenth-
century idea, expressed by Walpole in 1719, that nobility was necessary to free
government.^35
The Massachusetts Government Act of 1774 made the appointment of council-
lors run at the King’s pleasure, that is, for indefinite terms. It said nothing of he-
reditary councillors, nor even of councillors for life. Its aim was to strengthen the
executive, not to build the equivalent of a native nobility. Yet, John Adams was not
wholly mistaken when, in his Novanglus of 1774, he sniffed the dangers of heredi-
tary lordship in every breeze from Britain. For the truth is that Lord North and
others who sponsored the Massachusetts Government Act seem honestly to have
believed that they were about to purge the Massachusetts government of its “cru-
dities,” as North called them, and endow the province with the more highly devel-
oped advantages of the British constitution, of which the essence was agreed to be
the balance between King, Lords, and Commons, or between the monarchic, aris-
tocratic, and democratic principles in the state.
The trouble with Massachusetts, said North in the Commons, explaining the
need for amending its government, was that the “democratic part” of its constitu-
tion was too strong. “There is something radically wrong in that constitution in
which no magistrate for such a number of years has ever done his duty in such a
manner as to enforce obedience to the laws.” Hence the King’s well- disposed
subjects (and it was true) had been at the mercy of the turbulent and the lawless.
The governor simply lacked the means to maintain law and order; he could not
act without the consent of a majority of his council, which depended on election
by the “democratic part”; he had no normal military force except the posse comi-
tatus, the very people by whom the laws were disobeyed. The purpose of the new
act, said North, was to “take the executive power from the democratic part of the
government.” Lord George Germain was more blunt. “I would not have men of
a mercantile cast every day collecting themselves together and debating on politi-
cal matters.” He would frankly make the council more like the Lords, and he
would have the corporate powers of towns exercised by a few individuals, as in
England. “I would wish to bring the constitution of America as similar to our
own as possible.”^36
35 For Bernard’s views, see Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 7–21; for Burke’s correspondent, see the
letter from Dr. John Gray, April 6, 1782 (to which there is no record of a reply) in the Wentworth-
Woodhouse manuscripts at the Sheffield Central Library; for the Canada Act, see 31 George III c. 31
and the accompanying debates in Parliament. On Walpole see Chapter III above.
36 Parliamentary History, XVII, 1192–95.