The British Parliament 135
the King, Lords, and Commons of Great Britain they were under a remote oligar-
chy with which they had no connection; or they would be like the Dutch (for
Adams knew something of Europe) where the Estates of Holland had formerly
been elected, but were now an oligarchy that filled its own vacancies. Parliament,
he said, could not assert authority in America except by the ultima ratio of Louis
XIV; he might have said “Louis XV” if the Boston newspapers had carried more
news of France, where the claim of the French Parlements to represent the French
people was in fact being currently suppressed by the French King. And if Britain
persisted, said Adams prophetically, all Europe would call her a tyrant.
In England it was the radicals who were most willing to grant what the Ameri-
cans really demanded, because they had no reason to be sticklers for the powers of
Parliament. It was the British radicals, not the British Whigs, who corresponded
to what were called Whigs in America. Thus Major John Cartwright, “father of
English reform,” who began a half a century of agitation for the democratizing of
Parliament with his pamphlet Take Your Choice in 1776, published anonymously in
1774 another tract called American Independence the Interest and Glory of Great
Britain.^39 It outlined a scheme by which the American legislatures should be really
the equals of Parliament, joined in voluntary alliance under the Crown, and so
anticipated better than the proposals of Burke what came later to be called domin-
ion status. Another radical, Home Tooke, was fined and imprisoned after having
made himself conspicuous in the efforts of the Constitutional Society to raise
£100 for the widows and children of Americans killed at Lexington and Concord.
Richard Price’s Observations on Civil Liberty, in 1776, demanded better representa-
tion of the people in the Commons, denied the omnipotence of Parliament, and
defended the American rebels. John Wilkes, when he stood for Parliament in
Middlesex in 1774, offered a program both of Parliamentary reform and of resto-
ration of American rights; and when he introduced his reform bill in the Com-
mons in 1776 he declared that the unrepresentativesness of the Parliament was a
main cause of a needless American war. It was in fact a favorite idea of radicals and
reformers, and long remained so (though one may question the truth of it), that if
Parliament had really represented the British people America would never have
been estranged.^40
39 Cartwright’s views on Parliament may be judged from the full title of his well- known pam-
phlet, Take Your Choice! Representation and Respect; Imposition and Contempt. Annual Parliaments and
Liberty, Long Parliaments and Slavery. Postgate remarks of Wilkes that he left no name as a Parliamen-
tarian because he “despised” the House of Commons; That Devil Wilkes, 207. Another work is worthy
of comment in a book devoted to the international context, since it was written by Jean- Paul Marat,
then a fashionable doctor in Soho, who brought it out anonymously in an expensive format in 1774.
Since the Critical Review, X X XVII (1774), 366–70, called it “useful,” “laudable,” and “intelligent,”
and hoped that readers would take its advice, it seems worthwhile to convey the atmosphere of the day
by giving Marat’s title at length: The Chains of Slavery, a work wherein the clandestine and villainous at-
tempts of princes to ruin liberty are pointed out and the dreadful scenes of despotism disclosed, to which is pre-
fixed an address to the electors of Great Britain in order to draw their timely attention to the choice of proper
representatives in the next Parliament (London, 1774).
40 Guttridge, Whiggism, 63, 87; Dora M. Clark, British Opinion and the American Revolution
(New Haven, 1930), 180.