Independence Day

by Unknown

The rebellious colonists also read Locke’s “Two Treatises on Government” with much profit and satisfaction to themselves. Locke was an extreme Whig, an English revolutionist of the school of 1688. Before that great event, he had been unendurable to the royalists, who were in power, and had been obliged to spend a large part of his time on the continent. In the preface of his “Two Treatises,” he says that they will show how entirely legitimate is the title of William III to the throne, because it is established on the consent of the people. That is the burden of his whole argument—the consent of the people as the only true foundation of government. That principle sank so deep into the minds of the patriot colonists that it was the foundation of all their political thought, and became an essentially American idea.

Beccaria, who, like Burlamaqui, was an Italian, also exercised great influence on the colonists. His famous book, “Crimes and Punishments,” was also a short, concise, but very eloquent volume. It caused a great stir in the world. The translation circulated in America had added to it a characteristic commentary by Voltaire. Beccaria, though not writing directly on the subject of liberty, necessarily included that subject, because he dealt with the administration of the criminal law. His plea for more humane and just punishments, and for punishments more in proportion to the offense, found a ready sympathy among the Americans, who had already revolted in disgust from the brutality and extravagant cruelty of the English criminal code.

But Beccaria also stated most beautifully and clearly the essential principles of liberty. His foundation doctrine, that “every act of authority of one man over another for which there is not absolute necessity is tyrannical,” made a most profound impression in America. He laid down also the principle that “in every human society there is an effort continually tending to confer on one part the highest power and happiness, and to reduce the other to the extreme of weakness and misery.” That sentence became the life-long guide of many Americans. It became a constituent part of the minds of Jefferson and Hamilton. It can be seen as the foundation, the connecting strand, running all through the essays of the Federalist. It was the inspiration of the “checks and balances” in the national Constitution. It can be traced in American thought and legislation down to the present time.

Burlamaqui’s book, devoted exclusively to the subject of liberty and independence, is still one of the best expositions of the true doctrines of natural law, or the rights of man. At the time of the Revolution these rights of man were often spoken of as our rights as men, which is a very descriptive phrase, because the essence of those rights is political manhood, honorable self-reliance as opposed to degenerate dependence.

Burlamaqui belonged to a Protestant family that had once lived at Lucca, Italy; but had been compelled, like the family of Turretini, and many others, to take refuge in Switzerland. He became a professor at Geneva, which gave him the reputation of a learned man. He also became a counselor of state and was noted for his practical sagacity. He had intended to write a great work in many volumes on the subject to which he had devoted so much of his life, “The Principles of Natural Law,” as it was then called. Ill health preventing such a huge task, he prepared a single volume, which he said was only for beginners and students, because it dealt with the bare elements of the science in the simplest and plainest language.

This little book was translated into English in 1748, and contained only three hundred pages; but in that small space of large, clear type, Burlamaqui compressed everything that the patriot colonists wanted to know. He was remarkably clear and concise, and gave the Americans the qualities of the Italian mind at its best. He aroused them by his modern glowing thought and his enthusiasm for progress and liberty. His handy little volume was vastly more effective and far-reaching than would have been the blunderbuss he had intended to load to the muzzle.

If we examine the volumes of Burlamaqui’s predecessors, Grotius, Puffendorf, and the others, we find their statements about natural law and our rights as men rather brief, vague, and general, as is usual with the old writers on any science. Burlamaqui brought them down to date, developed their principles, and swept in the results of all the thought and criticism since their day.

The term natural law, which all these writers used, has long since gone out of fashion. They used it because, inspired by the Reformation, they were struggling to get away from the arbitrary system, the artificial scholasticism, the despotism of the middle ages. They were seeking to obtain for law and government a foundation which should grow out of the nature of things, the common facts of life that everybody understood. They sought a system that, being natural, would become established and eternal like nature; a system that would displace that thing of the middle ages which they detested, and called “arbitrary institution.”

Let us, they said, contemplate for a time man as he is in himself, the natural man, his wants and requirements.