The British Parliament 107
The British Constitution
There is a curious irony in the situation. The dozen years preceding the American
Revolution, the years when America was profoundly alienated, and which saw the
beginning of the British movement for parliamentary reform, were also the years
when awestruck wonder at the glories of the British constitution reached an al-
most ecstatic height. The very Stamp Act Congress announced its satisfaction at
living under “the most perfect form of government.” “The constitution of En-
gland,” declared a British book reviewer in 1775, “is without doubt the most per-
fect form of government that ever was devised by human wisdom.” To John Adams
it was “this stupendous fabric of human invention,” even after he and other Ameri-
cans no longer lived under it. The Younger Pitt, when he introduced his bill to re-
form the representation of the House of Commons in 1783, prefaced his speech
with a prolonged apologetic, expressing his unshaken faith in the unique advan-
tages of English liberty, as if himself incredulous that such a constitution needed
any reform at all.^2 In the disputes that arose between King George’s subjects in
Britain and America after 1763, and in those which continued to trouble Britain
itself after American independence, scarcely anyone denied that the British consti-
tution was the most remarkable constitution in the history of the world. There was,
however, some difference of opinion on the precise content of this matchless frame
of state—on the concrete questions of what particular rights it guaranteed to what
people, and why.
There were good reasons why all Britons, including British colonials, should
have felt such self- satisfaction, and why Europeans of other nationalities should
have joined in the chorus of praise. There was, for one thing, an objective ground
for it. In the slums of London, or among dispossessed agricultural laborers, or
pauper children, or the Irish tenantry, there were people as wretched as any in
Europe. Nevertheless, there was an air of freedom in the British world, a con-
structive liberty which, unlike the “liberties” so common in Europe, actually
added to the power of the laws and of the state; a general tolerance between
classes, a forbearance toward religious minorities, a wide latitude in the expression
of opinion, a relatively uncontrolled press, with much public discussion; a good
deal of personal security for most of the population, together with a high degree
of wealth, industry, and prosperity, of which the fruits were as evenly distributed
as in other large states of Europe, for while the rich in England were probably
richer than elsewhere, the English poor, in a general way, may have been a little
less poor than in most parts of the Continent. Probably contemporaries were not
altogether mistaken in ascribing these blessings to the form of government; at
any rate, the existence of such blessings added enormously to the repute, in En-
gland and in Europe, in which the form of government was held. The spectacular
victory of the Seven Years’ War had the same effect. The islanders had humbled
the combined powers of Austria, France, and Spain; Hapsburgs and Bourbons
2 For the Stamp Act Congress see L. Gipson, Coming of the Revolution (N.Y., 1954), 100; for the
reviewer, Critical Review, vol. 39 (1775), p. 345; for Adams, Defense of the Constitutions (1786), Work s
IV (1851), 358; for Pitt, Parliamentary History, X XIII, 827.