Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Within two weeks of news of the surrender [at Saratoga], the French, in fear that the British might now offer acceptable peace terms to their former colonies, hastened to inform the American envoys of their decision to recignize the new born United States, and three weeks later of their readiness to enter into alliance."

"though believing in the justice of the amrican cause, [the British opposition] could not help fearing that a victory for the American democracy represented a threat to parliamentary supremacy and a dangerous stimulus to the Reform movement."

"Whether [the British Parliament] liked it or not, the American spirit of liberty existed; their forebears emigrated because of it, and it remained stronger in the English colonists than probably in any other people on earth..."

"[The delegates to the first Continental Congress] were men who had no wish to combine with Britain they thought of as corrupt, decadent and hostile to liberty."

"By uniting the colonies into a whole, the Coercive Acts accomplished the same cohesion in adversary as the Japanese attack on Pearl Habour accomplished two centuries later - and with ultimately the same result."

"The most furiously resented of the measures, though it was not of the Coercive Acts was the simultaneous Quebec Act extending Canada's boundaries to the Ohio river, where Virginia and other colonies had territorial claims...95% of Canadians were Catholic."

"Three more Coercive Acts followed in rapid succession. First was the Massachusetts Regulatory Act, virtually anulling the charter of the Bay Colony. Rights of elections and appointment of officials, representatives, judges and juries and the basic right to summon town meetings..."

The argument from power held that if untaxed, the colonies would attract many English skilled workmen and manufactures to settle there, would prosper and eventually dominate, leaving England 'A poor deserted deplorable Kingdom'."

"Chatam's insistence on conciliation was based on his fear that if America were driven to resistance by force and the empire were lost, France or Spain would acquire it and "if this happens, England is no more""

"It is astonishing fact that, apart from the Army and Navy officers, no minister of a British government from 1763 to 1775, much less before or after, ever visited the trans-Atlantic provinces upon which they felt the empire depended".

"Separately, at different times, the other colonies followed, agitation subsided and the absence of unity confirmed Britain in the assumption that the colonies would never join in a common front and the loyalist sentiment and economic self-interest would prevail over seditious impulse."

"Receipts from the Townshend Duties in there first year amounted to £16,000, compared to militaty expenditure for America of £170,000."

"Breaking the mercantilist yoke while developing home industries was indeed an idea that had taken hold of the Americans, prompted by the success of non-importation."

"The colonies owned no contribution to governing costs since Britain already reaped profit from their control of trade."

"Horace Walpole...added another disturbing factor: enforcement which could "risk lighting up a rebellion' might be a cause of the colonies' flinging themselves into the arms of France or Spain." - which ultimately they did.

"...when Lord Shelburne was to suggest, after the days of violence, flames and deaths during the Gordon riots of 1780, that the time had come for an organized police, he was regarded as advocating a thing only suitable to French absolutism." - Shelburne was at the same time sympathetic to the colonies.

"Behind the stated motive [for the Boundaries Proclamation of 1763] was a desire to restrict the colonists to the Atlantic seaboard, where they would continue to import British goods, and to prevent debtors and adventurers from crossing the mountains and planting a settlement free of British sovereignty in the heart of America."

"Socially [the Earl of Sandwich] was a crony of Dashwood's Hellfire circle and so addicted to gambling that, sparing no time for meals, he would slap a slice of meat between two slices of bread to eat while gaming..."

"Until 1768, no department was specifically charged with charged with administration of the colonies or execution of measures pertaining to them..."

"Ministers were appointed by the Crown as individuals and pursued their own ideas of policy without consulting their colleagues."

"[politically sensitive colonials] suspected the British of suspecting them, now that they were freed of threat from the French, of habouring intent to throw off the British yoke, and they thus beleived the mother country was planning 'to fix upon us a large numbet of troops under pretense of our defence but rather designed as a rod and check over us;"

"...cultural ignorance, a frequent component of folly...Judging America by themselves, the Japanese assumed that the American government could take the nation into war whenever it wished, as Japan would have done and indeed did." - my own cultural ignorance of Hungary in '93.

"But if they have set limits to the duration of their legislative, and made this supreme power in any Person, or Assembly, only temporary: Or else, when by the miscarriages of those in Authority, it is forfeited; upon the forfeiture, or at the Determination of the Time set, it reverts to the society, and the People have a right to act as Supreme.." - i.e. an election offers society a chance to renew itself.

"For wherever the Power, that is put in any Hands for the Government of the people, and the Preservation of their properties is applied to other Ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass or subdue them to the arbitrary Commands of those who have it: there presently becomes Tyranny whether those that thus use it are one or many." - but the fewer that govern, the easier it is form a tyranny.

"The history of that ride, sir, would make a most exciting book" - but not one Conrad is going to provide us with.

"As to his own usefulness, he reflected bitterly it was also in his own character." - In Dr Monygham, Conrad anticipates Grahame Greene's entire öuevre.

"The working of the usual public institutions presented itself to him as a series of calamities overtaking private individuals and flowing logically from each other through hate, revenge, folly and rapacity, as though they had been part of a divine dispensation." - I should count my blessings, here I deal only with rapacity, Orbán prides himself on how noiselessly he plucks the goose.

"They were proud of, and attached to, the mine. It had secured their confidence and belief. They invested it with a protecting and invisible virtue as though it were a fetish made by their own hands, for they were ignorant, and in other respects did not differ appreciably from the rest of mankind which puts infinite trust in its own creations." - me included.

"...as soon as God shall give those under their subjection Courage and Opportunity to do it" - God intervenes in the affairs of men.

"Grants, Promises and Oaths, are bonds that hold the Almighty" - any monarch is bound to sworn word, any one has the right to overthrow a perjured monarch.