The Americans fear that the number of representatives which will be allowed to them, will have no power proportionable to their share of interest in the community, that this union to the British Legislature will only involve them in the conclusions of a majority, which will thence claim a right to tax them, and to restrain their trade, manufactures and settlements as they please. The Briton fears that these representatives may be an united phalanx, firmly opposing every tax proposed to be laid upon the Colonies, and every regulation meant to keep their actions and interest in due subordination to the whole; that they will be a party, a faction, a flying squadron, always ready, and in most cases capable, by uniting with opposition to Administration, or with commercial factions, to distress Government and the landed interest of the Kingdom. The Americans again, on the other hand, fear that some future British Ministry, in some future days of corruption, will succeed in bribing their representatives, against which the Colonies will have no remedy, but must submit to the betraying consequences. These are objections which, on the very supposition, mutually counteract and destroy one another. They are objections which have had fair trial upon experience, in the case of the Scots members, and are directly contradicted by truth and fact.

Neither Bernard's nor Pownall's proposition seems to have ever made any impression either in America or Great Britain.

For the Colonies to have exchanged their positions as States constituting component parts of the British Empire, subordinated to Great Britain, and its Government, as a Central Tribunal sitting to determine, through experts, on just principles, their rights and the rights of their inhabitants, in the great political organism, before which Tribunal they were represented by their Agents, who were heard before any dispositions made affecting their interests became final, for a position in which they would have been States in a condition of contractual subjection to the mere will of Great Britain, and its Government, ex

cept in so far as it had agreed they should not be, or for a position in which their inhabitants would have constituted an integral part of the whole population subject to the unconditioned and unlimited will of a Parliament, in the Lower House only of which they were represented, sitting three thousand miles away in England,-would have been for them to commit political suicide.

Nor had England anything to gain from the adoption of either Bernard's or Pownall's idea of the relationship. The relationship advocated by Bernard would have lasted exactly as long as the Colonies were too weak to require something better. That any population should in any respect submit to the unconditional and unlimited power of any body of people over which they had no control, if they could help it, was inconceivable. If the Colonies should ever become the stronger party, it was likely to go hard with Great Britain. The relationship of Great Britain to the Colonies advocated by Pownall was plainly dangerous for Great Britain, as he himself admits, for it based the whole power, in the long run, on population, or on wealth and population combined, and, if America ever exceeded Great Britain in wealth and population, inevitably resulted in the removal of the Seat of Empire to America.

Under the Imperial Federal Unity that really existed, Great Britain could retain its position as the Imperial State so long as its Government was best fitted to act as the Central Tribunal for the Colonies as States that is, so long as it was best fitted to make dispositions concerning their affairs, and needful rules and regulations respecting them and their inhabitants in accordance with its dispositions.

CHAPTER XII

THE IMPERIAL SECRETARIAT, 1768

HOUGH Pownall's work was ineffective in so far as

TH

he tried to convert the English and American people to the idea that that which had existed for a century and a half as the British Empire was really a British Unitary State, it had, in another direction, an immediate and direct result. The real purpose of his book, as it was originally written, was to advocate a reform in the Home Administration of the Empire. The important point that he made was that the business of the British State relating to the Empire in America— that is, the relations between Great Britain and the Col. onies-ought properly to be in the charge of a Secretary of State. This amounted to saying that the relations with the Colonies were, by the nature of things, differentiated from both the domestic and the foreign relations of Great Britain, since a Secretariat of State is one of the great and fundamental Departments of the business of the State, which exists because of the permanent and fundamental differences in the functions of the State in some of its relations from those which it has in other relations. This proposition of Pownall's brought into clear light a distinction regarding the functions of the State, which, though acted upon from the time when the relations with the dependencies were placed in the advisory charge of a Committee of the Privy Council distinct from the Committee having charge of either the domestic or foreign affairs of the State, had never been clearly stated. It

meant that thereafter the British State was to be recognized as the subject and object of a new class of obligations. Up to that time, only two classes of obligations to which the State was subject in time of peace had been recognized-obligations which it owed to its own inhabitants and municipal corporations, which it performed through the instrumentality of a Secretary or a Secretarial Board for Home Affairs, and those which it owed to foreign States and their inhabitants and municipal corporations, which it performed through the instrumentality of a Secretary or Secretarial Board for Foreign Affairs. The obligations of the State to its own inhabitants and municipal corporations were determined by its Constitution, by the unwritten law, and by the will of its Legislature; its obligations to foreign States and their inhabitants and municipal corporations were determined by treaty or by the rules of international law. The proposition to place the relations between Great Britain and the American Colonies in the charge of a Secretariat of State, therefore necessarily implied that the Colonies were neither integral parts of the Realm nor foreign States, and that the relations between them were neither domestic nor foreign relations, but were of a different kind from either, to be determined neither by the Constitution, the unwritten law, or the statutes of the State, nor by treaties or the international law, but by an equity derived from all these, as principles.

At the time Pownall wrote, though the difference in functions between the Home Department and the Foreign Department was recognized, there did not exist in Great Britain a Home Secretary and a Foreign Secretary having charge of the respective duties of these Departments. There were two Principal Secretaries of State, but their duties were determined arbitrarily and geographically, instead of rationally and scientifically. One Secretary had charge of what was called the Northern

Department, including Denmark, Flanders, Germany, the German Principalities and States, Holland, Poland, Saxony, Prussia, Russia, and Sweden; and the other of the Southern Department, which included England, Scotland, Ireland, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, the other islands near Great Britain, the American and West Indian Colonies, the East Indian establishments, France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Italy, the Barbary States, and Turkey. The Secretary of State for the Southern Department was thus the Secretary of State for Home and Imperial Affairs and in part for Foreign Affairs; and the Secretary for the Northern Department the Secretary in part for Foreign Affairs.

In advocating the establishment of a Secretariat of State to have charge of the relations with the Colonies, Pownall said:

The forming some general system of administration, some plan which should be (whatever may be the changes of the Ministry at home, or in the Governors and officers employed abroad) uniformly and permanently pursued by measures founded on the actual state of things as they arise, leading to this great end, is, at this crisis, the precise duty of Govern

ment.

To enable the British nation to profit of these present circumstances, or of the future events, as they shall successively arise in the natural procession of effects, it is necessary that the Administration form itself into such establishments for the direction of these interests [the British commercial interests] and powers, as may keep them [the Colonial commercial interests then beginning to arise] in their natural channel, as may maintain their due connections with the Government, and lead them to the utmost effect they are capable of producing towards this grand point.

The first spring of this direction, the basis of this government, is the Administration at home. If that Department of