Next year, it will be 250 years since our glorious Union was founded, and after so long a time, and the state of modern education being what it is, this anniversary may be a good opportunity for Americans of today to learn some of their nation’s basic history.
It might be edifying as well if our foreign friends took some instruction, especially those in Britain, who are aware of nothing important before 1948, when the National Health Service was formed.
For instance, Mr. Tom Armstrong recently asked in American Thinker why the Americans were so unhappy with the taxes being imposed upon them from London in the late colonial period, given that they were less than what many Europeans paid. He might as well have asked what all the fuss was about with King John and his taxes and the Magna Carta in 1215. In both cases, it was the fundamental idea that there could be ”no taxation without representation.”
For 150 years, Great Britain was content to leave the Americans alone to build their colonies on the raw frontier. After the French and Indian War, in which the majority of North American soldiers were colonial militia, the cheapskates in London decided that the American colonists would pay off Britain’s war debts, while the great prize of the conflict, the vast western lands in the Proclamation of 1763, were off limits.
This is a bit like Tony Soprano going to some small business and demanding protection money, explaining that it is really a great deal, as it is less than what the Mafia charges in Sicily. Americans then and now don’t put up with this kind of robbery.
Europeans in the Middle Ages didn’t, either. Back then, thanks to the natural law ideas of the Western Church, secular princes were limited in their power. Many local officials were elected, and the concept of natural rights for all individuals flourished under the common law in England and similar systems on the continent. Sadly, that largely ended with the absolutist monarchies that emerged in the Reformation, as Protestant churches became mere appendages of government and the Catholics were greatly diminished. Strong, centralized governments, willing to tax their people into oblivion, were the rule.
In America, though, Christian natural law never went out of style. That’s why our nation was so successful from the start. With independence came the end of the often brutal “indentured servitude” system, as state governments refused to enforce such agreements. Many of them also ended slavery, starting in 1780 with Pennsylvania, and our U.S. Constitution abolished the slave trade. This was long before Britain ended slavery in its colonies in 1834, which was often just replaced with debt peonage and indentured servitude.
Mr. Armstrong also seems to think the years following the Revolution were a mess. No, they were an amazing triumph. The Founding Fathers calmly created the federal system along with a stable currency, flourishing to this day, after seeing the shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation. From 1780 to 1800, the U.S. population doubled, and the Industrial Age had hardly begun before American technology raced ahead with things like assembly lines and pioneer steamboats.
Mr. Armstrong thinks the “Whiskey Rebellion,” over democratically approved taxes, is somehow comparable to the Revolution, when in reality it was a mere protest, where at most four men were killed.
He also suggests that the Civil War over slavery was America sorting out its Constitution. No, it was a million Americans fighting for the rule of law and to clean up the bitter racial legacy left behind by the European empires. Even then, British imperialists nearly blundered onto the Confederate side in the Civil War on several occasions, backing down only when it was explained that Lincoln could take Canada in less than a week.
Add to that Britain’s messy colonial wars and the misguided statecraft across centuries of global conflict.
In a final, desperate insult, Mr. Armstrong also claims that cricket is too difficult for American rubes to understand. No, it’s simply too boring for normal human beings to endure. If a wicket peg is knocked down, the batter is out, or if a batted ball is caught on the fly. Simple — only that rarely seems to happen. The batters swat away balls for hours, or days, on end. Sometimes they run to the opposite wicket.
Unlike the rest of Mr. Armstrong’s arguments, there might be a case to be made for cricket. The game became big in India and Pakistan in the 1950s, and despite the deep hatreds there, those two countries have never followed through on a really big shooting war. No doubt, cricket keeps them in a perpetual state of drowsiness, if not outright torpor.
I am thinking, if we could only send Mr. Armstrong to Gaza to set up a cricket league, we might finally have peace in the Middle East.
Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky.
Image via Pxhere.