– WHO IS AN AMERICAN? –
From Henry Care, English Liberties, Or, The Free-Born Subject’s Inheritance (1680).
Before the United States existed as an independent nation, settlers in Britain’s North American colonies shared a sense of identity linked with the idea that liberty was a unique possession of Englishmen. Care was a British journalist and writer on politics. His book was an influential example of how seventeenth-century identities rested, in part, on negative images of other nations. Well into the eighteenth century, it was widely reprinted in the colonies as well as the mother country.
The Constitution of our English government (the best in the world) is no arbitrary tyranny like the Turkish Grand Seignior’s, or the French Kings, whose wills (or rather lusts) dispose of the lives and fortunes of their unhappy subjects; nor an Oligarchy where the great men (like fish in the ocean) prey upon, and live by devouring the lesser at their pleasure. Nor yet a Democracy or popular State, much less an Anarchy, where all confusedly are hail fellows well met, but a most excellently mixt or qualified Monarchy, where the King is vested with large prerogatives sufficient to support majesty; and restrained only from power of doing himself and his people harm, which would be contrary to the end of all government, . . . the nobility adorned with privileges to be a screen to majesty, and a refreshing shade to their inferiors, and the commonality, too, so guarded in their persons and properties by the fence of law, [which] renders them Freemen, not Slaves.
In France and other nations the mere will of the prince is law, his word takes off any . . . head, imposes taxes, or seizes any man’s estate, when, how, and as often as he wishes. . . . But in England, the law is both the measure and the bond of every subject’s duty and allegiance, each man having a fixed fundamental right born with him as to the freedom of his person and property in his estate, which he cannot be deprived of, but either by his consent, or some crime for which the law has imposed . . . a penalty. . . .
This original happy frame of government is truly and properly called an Englishman’s liberty, a privilege not to [be] exempt from the law, but to be freed in person and estate, from arbitrary violence and oppression.
| Questions |
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| 1. Why does Care consider the English system of “balanced” government the best in the world? How does his view of other countries affect his pride in being English? |