Here again are the same constant sympathy with Liberty, the same confidence in our national destinies, and the same aspirations for our prosperity, mingled with warnings against disturbing influences. He exhorts that all our foundations should be “laid in Nature”; that there should be “no contention for, nor acquisition of, unequal domination in men”; and that union should be established on the attractive principle by which all are drawn to a common centre.[555] He fears difficulty in making the line of frontier between us and the British Provinces “a line of peace,” as it ought to be; he is anxious lest something may break out between us and Spain; and he suggests that possibly, “in the cool hours of unimpassioned reflection,” we may learn the danger of our “alliances,”[556]—referring plainly to that original alliance with France which at a later day was the occasion of such trouble. Two other warnings occur. One is against Slavery,[557] which is more memorable, because in an earlier Memorial he enumerates among articles of commerce “African slaves, carried by a circuitous trade in American shipping to the West India markets.”[558] The other warning is thus strongly expressed:—
“Every inhabitant of America is, de facto as well as de jure, equal, in his essential, inseparable rights of the individual, to any other individual,—is, in these rights, independent of any power that any other can assume over him, over his labor, or his property. This is a principle in act and deed, and not a mere speculative theorem.”[559]
This strange and striking testimony, all from one man, is enhanced by his farewell words to Franklin. As Pownall heard that the great philosopher and negotiator was about to embark for the United States, he wrote to him from Lausanne, 3d July, 1785:—
“Adieu, my dear friend. You are going to a New World, formed to exhibit a scene which the Old World never yet saw. You leave me here in the Old World, which, like myself, begins to feel, as Asia hath felt, that it is wearing out apace. We shall never meet again on this earth; but there is another world where we shall meet, and where we shall be understood.”[560]
The correspondence was continued across the intervening ocean. In a letter to Franklin, dated at Bristol, 8th April, 1788, the same devoted reformer refers to the Congress at Albany in 1754, “when the events which have since come into fact first began to develop themselves, as ready to burst into bloom, and to bring forth the fruits of Liberty which you in America at present enjoy.” He is cheered in his old age by the proceedings in the Convention to frame a Constitution, with Franklin’s “report of a system of sovereignty founded in law, and above which law only was sovereign”; and he begins “to entertain hopes for the liberties of America, and for what will be an asylum one day or other to a remnant of mankind who wish and deserve to live with political liberty.” His disturbance at the Presidential term breaks out: “I have some fears of mischief from the orbit of four years’ period which you give to the rotation of the office of President. It may become the ground of intrigue.”[561] Here friendly anxiety is elevated by hope, where America appears as the asylum of Liberty.
Clearly Pownall was not understood in his time; but it is evident that he understood our country as few Englishmen since have been able to understand it.
How few of his contemporaries saw America with his insight and courage! The prevailing sentiment was typified in the conduct of George the Third, so boldly arraigned in the Declaration of Independence. Individual opinions also attest the contrast, and help to glorify Pownall. Thus, Shirley, like himself a Massachusetts governor, in advising the King to strengthen Louisburg, wrote, under date of July 10, 1745:—
“It would, by its vicinity to the British Colonies, and being the key of ’em, give the Crown of Great Britain a most absolute hold and command of ’em, if ever there should come a time when they should go restiff and disposed to shake off their dependency upon their mother country, the possibility of which seems some centuries further off than it does to some gentlemen at home.”[562]
Nothing of the prophet here. Nor was Hume more penetrating in his History first published, although he commemorates properly the early settlement of the country:—
“What chiefly renders the reign of James memorable is the commencement of the English colonies in America, colonies established on the noblest footing that has been known in any age or nation.…