The American Spectator

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Templeton Essay

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RICH MEN HAVE CONTINUED to use their resources to fight unjust authority in cases where poor men have no choice but to submit. A significant case occurred as recently as the early 1950s, in Churchill's postwar government. The war had invested government with all kinds of extraordinary powers over persons and property, and Parliament was slow to revoke this. The Marten family, considerable landowners in Dorset, had been forced to sell land at Critchel Down in 1940, to the Royal Air Force. At the end of the war, Commander Marten, head of the family, asked to buy the land back. This was refused. Instead the land was transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture, which in turn let it to a tenant.

Marten, a man as obstinate as Hampden and as wealthy, fought the case. He eventually got an inquiry, which after much legal expenditure, found in his favor. The whole affair was an example of bureaucratic arrogance. The Minister of Agriculture, Sir Thomas Dugdale, who had been misled and lied to by his civil servants, felt bound in honor to resign, and his parliamentary secretary, Lord Carrington (later a distinguished Foreign Minister), tried to do likewise, but was persuaded to remain by Churchill, who was greatly perturbed by the bureaucratic tyranny revealed by the affair, and promised to speed up the repeal of all such wartime infringements of liberty. Thus Marten not only got his land back but won a much larger battle.

Sir James Goldsmith, the billionaire, told me, not long before his death, that he intended to devote his life and fortune to fighting instances of government oppression of individuals who were too poor to fight for themselves. Alas, he died, aged 65, soon after. Would there were rich men today ready to carry out his intentions, for the curse of bureaucracy has never been heavier, the number of regulations more numerous, or the cost of resisting any injustice more ruinous.

THE SECOND WAY in which the English-speaking peoples developed differently from their Continental neighbors was in using the principle of private property to further overseas expansion. This, in turn of course, enabled colonies thus founded to proceed from the start to govern themselves and found representative institutions. In Portugal and Spain, forerunners in the field, the state did all and financed all, and the crowns of the two countries treated colonies as the personal possessions of the sovereign who retained all rights. The French crown, broadly speaking, adopted the same policy, until in due course, in a moment of madness, the Emperor Napoleon sold all that remained, the Louisiana Purchase, to the American government in 1803 for a paltry sum.

The English approach was quite different. The work of voyaging, exploration, and settlement was left entirely to private enterprise. Individual "adventurers" fitted out their own expeditions, as Sir Walter Raleigh did with the first settlement of Virginia at Roanoke. More usually, a commercial company was formed, in which men—and women— took shares and divided the profits accordingly. Royalty might participate, but as individual shareholders, on exactly the same terms as their subjects. Thus Queen Elizabeth herself had shares in Sir Francis Drake's great voyage round the world, reaping a splendid harvest of profit. The settlement of both Virginia and Massachusetts was undertaken by commercial companies, setting a pattern followed for a century.

Never in the history of human institutions has the connection between individual property and individual liberty been so surely and openly demonstrated. Obviously where private fortunes supplied the finance for the colony, private views would determine its government. To be sure, the companies operated under Crown license, and the Crown might appoint governors. But the principles of representation and self-government applied from the start. Indeed in the case of Massachusetts, the first constitutional meeting took place while the Mayflower was still at sea. The Crown had neither the money, power, or will to rule its American colonies, as Portugal, Spain, and France ruled theirs, and by the time it formed the inclination to exercise authority, in the late 17th century, it was too late: The American colonies were, in effect, self-governing.

Then when George III and his ministers imposed the Stamp Duty, they were seen as acting as usurpers and innovators, overthrowing an unwritten constitution of immemorial antiquity, and the king could easily be portrayed as another King John or Charles I. The wealthy men who financed the original settlement tended to be radicals in religion and in politics: those who believed in constitutionalism and representation. Many of them were prominent in Parliament in resisting James I and Charles I. Hampden himself, for instance, was one of the 12 men to whom the Earl of Warwick granted in 1631-2 a large tract of land in what is now the state of Connecticut. The colonists followed closely and profited from the events of the Civil War, and its aftermath. In the running of the colonies, the connection between private wealth in land, personal fortunes, and the holding of office was continually emphasized. The colonists noted, too, that when the English twice dispossessed the monarch, first in 1688 when James II was replaced by his daughter Mary and his son-in-law William III, and then in 1715 when the Stuart line was effectively replaced by the Hanoverians, the effective leaders in both moves were the great Whig landowning families, such as the Russells, the Cavendishes, and the Spensers. They turned a monarchy founded on the "divine right of kings" into one founded on the sovereignty of "the King in Parliament."

IMPOSSIBLE, THEN, to exagg erate the importance of that unique form of private property, the ownership of freehold land, in the progress of liberty among the English-speaking peoples. The connection continued in American history. The great majority of those who created the American Revolution in the 1770s owned freehold land, often in large parcels. They saw themselves as the natural successors of the landed gentry who resisted Charles I and raised troops of horses at their own charge to fight him. As one of them put it, "they rummaged in Rushworth's Collections [documents about the Civil War of the 1640s] to find precedents."

Outstanding among them was George Washington, not only because of his height (6'3") but also because of his landed possessions, which were enormous, and which he farmed and exploited with industry and skill, then and later, to make himself one of the richest men in the hemisphere. Washington took a landowner's view of the crisis. Of course he objected to "taxation without representation."

But his particular objection was the royal ordinance, which might, if enforced, prevent Americans from occupying and exploiting land beyond the Appalachians. He saw that America's long-term future was in thrusting across to the Pacific and taking the entire continent. In his own way he was a "manifest destiny" believer, and that is why he took up the sword. He wanted to serve without pay, both as general of the forces and later, as president, because he believed men of individual wealth had a duty to defend and promote freedom— in other words, richesse oblige. He saw himself as setting an example for all property owners. Unlike Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, he had a vision that went beyond mere liberty from England to a vast, property-owning nation, based on almost unlimited land. He had this vision because he had visited more of America than any other of the revolutionaries, and had penetrated further into it, so as to grasp its potential.

Historical experience shows that, at least in Anglo-Saxon societies, the possession of freehold land leads directly to participation in the exercise of power and the enjoyment of freedom. As America expanded inland, it adopted, and pursued on an enormous scale for over a century, a cheap land policy.

Under this, millions of immigrants to America, arriving without property, were able in one generation to acquire by borrowing, and eventually own without encumbrance, sizable farms. This process was accompanied by, and also promoted, the extension of the vote, initially to some, soon to many, eventually to all male citizens.

Ownership of land, as the most politically significant form of personal property, continued to be the mainspring of the American economy, as the impulse behind the growth of its democracy and freedoms, to the middle of the 19th century. But in the meantime, the Supreme Court under John Marshall, and the wisdom and energy of Marshall himself, had laid the juridical and legal basis of American capitalism, which in time produced a vast property-owning citizenry in America's burgeoning towns and cities, thus reinforcing freedom and democracy by ownership of non-landed assets.

IN MANY SOCIETIES outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition the development of liberty and permanent representative institutions was impeded by the insecurity of ownership. It was not so much that private property was rare as that there was no guarantee the courts would defend it in opposition to the state. Take the case, in France, of Nicholas Foucquet, Superintendant des Finances to Louis XIV and a younger contemporary of John Hampden. He amassed a great fortune, and built the magnificent chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, using the team of the landscape gardener André le Nôtre, the painter Charles le Brun, and the architect Louis le Vau. He made the mistake of entertaining the king there and displaying its splendors. Louis XIV, envious and competitive, promptly had Foucquet arrested and imprisoned for the remaining 19 years of his life, confiscated all his property, and used it, together with the design-team, to begin the building of Versailles.

There was no redress in a regime where a mere letter de cachet, sealed with the king's privy seal, could lead to perpetual imprisonment without trial, or exile. Hence in France under the ancien régime, the landed classes and wealthy merchants were seldom if ever tempted to use their assets to advance public liberties, taking rather the easy path of sharing the spoils with the royal government. The only hope of change was revolution, often leading to more oppression. In Russia the tsar alone enjoyed liberty of thought and action, and his property alone was secure. There, too, where private property could not be used to promote reform, the foreseeable end was popular uprising and the massacre of the royal family. In present-day Russia, where the rule of law is not yet firmly established, the new breed of financial oligarchs who have looted the country's natural assets, and flaunt their wealth in international society, are scarcely more secure than Nicholas Foucquet. Unfree regimes both in the recent past and today have employed a variety of devices to prevent private individuals either from acquiring substantial property, or from using it to promote liberties. In both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, currency controls and heavy punishment of any infringement of them, real or imaginary, were the favorite method. In Communist countries, the private sector had virtually no existence. That no longer applies in China, where huge fortunes are being amassed and many millions of the new bourgeoisie now possess substantial assets. But the absence of a rule of law that can be relied on to protect the individual and his assets against the state, and the obstacles raised to prevent their transfer abroad, keeps private property tame and harmless: no Hampdens there as yet. This is one of many reasons why China's progress to wealth and widely based prosperity is likely to be overtaken in due course by India, which enjoys the protection of the rule of law, first established by its British rulers, and where the rich can use their fortunes as they please, even against the government.