Free Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership by Conrad Black Page B

British right to regulate trade between parts of the Empire, but not to do anything that really touched the lives of the colonists. The problem with this outlook was that it amounted to Britain’s having the high privilege of assuring the security of the colonists, at British expense, and no authority to require anything of the colonists in return. Even if such a thing could be negotiated for the future, it left Britain with the heavy cost of having thrown the French out of North America, to protect the colonists, with the beneficiaries loudly claiming that it was their birthright as Englishmen, and the most well-to-do group of Englishmen at that, to refuse to pay anything toward their own salvation. That would not work as the modus operandi of a functioning empire.
    On the other side, the British imagined that they could do what they wished legislating over and for the colonists, that there was any truth to the fiction that the British Parliament represented the Americans, that the colonists, like those in Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands, had no capacity whatever for self-government, and that no American could possibly wish it except a few political demagogues and self-seekers. The Empire was not going to last long on such a flimsy foundation as that, either. It was in this deepening vortex that Franklin worked in London.
    Franklin had thought of American representation in the British Parliament, but it was soon clear that matters had deteriorated too far for that. The Americans would not seek it, in the same measure that the British would not offer it. There was already an obvious danger of armed conflict, as there was much talk in London of sending the British army to collect the stamp tax. Fortunately the ministry changed, and Pitt’s friend the Marquis of Rockingham became prime minister. Franklin met the new president of the Board of Trade, Lord Dartmouth, and proposed the suspension of the Stamp Act, until the colonies’ debt levels, which he attributed to the fiscal rigors of the late war, had subsided. (They were modest compared with Britain’s.) And then the Stamp Act could quietly expire. He also warned that the use of armed force to collect taxes in America would fail, as the soldiers would be induced to desert in large numbers by the higher pay scales of the American private sector, and by the impossibility of rounding up deserters in a country so vast and absorbent of dissenters.
    On February 13, 1766, Franklin appeared before Parliament in effect to answer for America. He did so brilliantly. He protested American loyalty, which had been affected by the British imposition of “an internal tax.” There had never been any objection to taxes on exports. Partly because of Franklin’s efforts, the British repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, but accompanied that move with the Declaratory Act, which averred that Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” Franklin wasn’t much bothered by that declaration, as long as nothing was done about it. He cherished a reform of the Empire that would cause Britain to shed even its right to excise taxes on exports. He was more convinced than ever that eventually America would surpass Britain and foresaw a gradual inversion of the relationship, that the American country would be the senior partner. A man of immense subtlety, congeniality, and diplomacy, Franklin exaggerated the ability of others to reason as thoughtfully as he did.
    He wrote home very happily of “the august body” of the British Parliament having done the right and sensible thing in repealing the Stamp Act, and predicted imperial reform. By this Franklin meant a single monarch of the Empire, but the main constituent parts entirely self-governing, or coordinating through a grand assembly of representatives meeting in equality and dealing with matters of common interest, as he had proposed for the colonies themselves. The first option was close to what the British