Frankfort the whole of Europe apparently settled down to a calmer and more sober existence. With the passing of the European war cloud, the colonies soon forgot all about their imperial war problems and turned once more to local politics. and their old parochial issues.

But there was one international question which they could not overlook, namely, the French penal settlements in the Pacific. The colonies were justly indignant at this moral pollution of the Pacific, so close to their own shores.' But they could do nothing by and of themselves. Their only means of redress was to appeal to the British government to use its good offices to secure an abatement of the nuisance. From the standpoint of the Australian colonies, the center of international interest had shifted for the time being from Europe to the Pacific. The rôles of colonies and the mother country were now reversed. The colonies were no longer being dragged at the chariot wheel of the British war lords; they had climbed up on the steps of the chariot and were trying to get hold of the reins of the British Foreign Office and direct its policy in the Southern Pacific to their own political ends. In short, the colonists were desirous of setting up a Monroe Doctrine of their own under the British flag. They were asking for British intervention in Australasian affairs. The advantages of the British connection were brought home to the colonies in realistic form. The ground was suddenly taken from under the feet of the neutralists. Their own materialistic arguments were turned against themselves. The colonists found out from experience that British citizenship was an asset, not a liability, a means of protection, not a source of danger, and that their political and economic interests coincided in the long run with their loyal attachment to the Empire. When this fact was made manifest, the neutrality agitation quickly petered out and was soon forgotten. Nothing more was heard of the subject until the South African War again revived interest in the question. But that is another story.

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

C. D. ALLIN

1 1 Quick and Garsan, Annotated Constitution of Australia, pp. 110-11.

THE RISE OF ANTI-IMPERIALISM IN ENGLAND

B

URKE was scarcely guilty of exaggeration when he said of Great Britain's old colonial policy that it was "purely commercial." It depended for its justification upon the doctrines of mercantilism, the politico-economic system that held sway in England from early modern times till the nineteenth century.' So long as those doctrines prevailed, colonies were prized because of the benefits which the mother country was supposed to derive from their trade, regulated by herself in her own interest-benefits which, it was believed, more than compensated her for the responsibilities and burdens of empire. But the time came when doubts were cast on the efficacy of the legal restrictions upon which mercantilism relied for the attainment of its objects, when the right of the mother country to rule colonial dependencies was questioned, when, above all, the fundamental assumptions and conclusions of the mercantile system itself were challenged. It was then that British antiimperialism had its origin.

In his classic attack on mercantilism Adam Smith denounced the colonial system root and branch, going so far as to assert that it would be beneficial to the people of Great Britain as a whole if the colonies were abandoned. He definitely associated anti-imperialism with laissez-faire economics, and the Manchester School looked back to him as the original Little-Englander. But even before the publication of The Wealth of Nations, some of the French physiocrats had condemned the old French colonial system, which was essentially similar to the British; 3 and an English contemporary of Smith's, Josiah

1 It is impossible to describe the old British colonial system within the limits of this article. It can best be studied in the following works of George Louis Beer: The Origins of the British Colonial System; The Old Colonial System, Part I (2 vols.); British Colonial Policy, 1754-1765; The Commercial Policy of England toward the American Colonies.

2 Goldwin Smith, The Empire, p. 21.

3 E. g., the elder Mirabeau, Philosophie rurale (Amsterdam, 1763), III, 224;

Tucker, wrote a number of tracts during the period of the American Revolution, the central idea of which, as stated by himself, was that "the colonies in quarreling with the Mother Country are essentially hurting themselves; and are greatly, though not intentionally benefiting us, by obliging us to see and pursue our own true and lasting interests."

Tucker en

joyed some vogue in his own day, and several of his pamphlets on economic and political subjects went through a number of editions. He undoubtedly had some influence on the physiocrats; one of his economic tracts was translated into French by Turgot. There is no evidence, however, that he either influenced or was influenced by Adam Smith; his published economic writings and the earliest of his colonial pamphlets appeared before the publication of The Wealth of Nations.3 Tucker was not wholly unknown to the political economists of later times; J. R. McCulloch in his Literature of Political Economy, published in 1845, gave the titles of some of his tracts and remarked that his writings displayed "great sagacity", and recently Professor Marshall has appraised Tucker's mind as one of "finest quality ". Some of Tucker's economic

Euvres de Turgot, ed. by E. Daire, vol. II, p. 551 et seq. Brougham thus contrasted the attitude of the mercantilists and the physiocrats toward colonies (An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers, Edinburgh, 1803, vol. I, pp. 5-6): "The disciples of the Mercantile System found, in these distant branches of the state [colonies], an unlimited field for the trial of their theory, by imposing such restraints as might render the industry of the inhabitants subservient to the wealth of the mother country, and by opening for her produce a market of growing extent, in which positive regulations might secure an exclusive preference, or fix a high price. They have, accordingly, viewed such establishments with a decided partiality. . . . The œconomists [physiocrats], on the other hand, have viewed, with more than common jealousy, those distant settlements, which are peopled and cultivated at the mother country's expense, and which hold out the temptations of foreign trade, to allure capital and industry from the great source of national riches-the improvement of the productive powers of the land."

1A Series of Answers to Certain Popular Objections against Separating from the Rebellious Colonies (Gloucester, 1776), p. 40.

Euvres de Turgot, ed. by Daire, vol. I, p. 322.

W. E. Clark, Josiah Tucker, pp. 33, 160, 217, 221-8.

P. 51.

Industry and Trade, p. 719 n.

writings were never published, and most of his published pam phlets were of a controversial and ephemeral character-fact which should be taken into account in explaining why he ex erted little influence on the subsequent course of English eco nomic thought.'

Tucker was born in 1713 and resided at Bristol, as curat and rector, from 1737 to 1758, when he became Dean of th Cathedral at Gloucester. In spite of his duties as a clergyma he found time to write extensively upon economic and politica questions. It is as an author of pamphlets on the relations be tween Great Britain and the colonies that he is usually remem bered when he is remembered at all-but years before the American Revolution he wrote a number of works on economic which show him to have been a keen observer and a bold rea soner. Most of them were written during the decade 1749-59 while he was living in Bristol, then next to London the largest city and the most important center of commerce in England. Of these, two, perhaps the ablest, The Elements of Commerce and Theory of Taxes and Instructions for Travellers, privately printed in 1755 and 1757, respectively, were never published and are now extremely rare. They were intended to form parts of a more comprehensive treatise on economics, an outline of which was appended to the Elements. This larger work Tucker never completed, but in Professor Walter E. Clark's Josiah Tucker, based upon an exhaustive study of Tucker's numerous writings, we have an excellent analysis of his economic system.

Tucker's anti-imperialism is to be explained, in part at least, by his economic opinions. Like the classical economists of later times he made self-interest the psychological basis of economics. Self-love he called "the great mover of created beings" and "that ruling principle of human nature." But, un

2

1 The best bibliography of Tucker is to be found in Clark, op. cit., pp. 241258. In The Journal of Political Economy, vol. II, pp. 330-347, P. L. Ford listed all of Tucker's colonial tracts. The low state to which Tucker has fallen in the estimation of his countrymen is evidenced by the fact that the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica devotes only a single brief paragraph to him.

2 Clark, op. cit., pp. 75, 87.

443 like the classical economists, he did not believe in the necessary harmony of individual and public interest. He held that the pursuit of the former might be injurious as well as beneficial to the latter, and that it was the business of government so to direct self-interest that it would conduce to the general welfare." One who took this view could be no advocate of laissez-faire, and in this respect Tucker is to be classed with the mercantilists rather than with the physiocrats and the classical economists.3 It is true that there are passages in his writings which, if read apart from their context, would seem to indicate that he favored complete freedom of trade between nations, but they probably mean no more than that he was opposed to exclusive, monopolistic privileges and desired the conditions of trade to be the same for all who engaged in it. His doctrine of selfinterest explains the opinion which he expressed in his colonial tracts that it was impossible effectively to regulate the trade of the colonies.

In his earlier economic writings Tucker did not take an antiimperial position; he was not opposed to the possession of colonies. He did indeed predict, as early as 1749, that the American colonies would revolt if the time came when they no longer needed British protection, but did not as yet dissent from the mercantile dogma that colonies were beneficial to the home country. The outline of his projected comprehensive treatise on economics shows that when he wrote it he regarded the improvement and extension of trade between the colonies and the mother country as a suitable means of developing British manufactures; and in The Elements of Commerce he advocated the establishment of a colony in the Hudson's Bay territory.7

1 Nor for that matter did Adam Smith; see Marshall, op. cit., p. 728. 2 Clark, op. cit., p. 86.

Ibid., pp. 91-5, and Part II, chaps. iv and v; Tucker, A Treatise concerning Civil Government (London, 1781), p. 77; Letters of Eminent Persons addressed to David Hume, pp. 176-7.