Jeremy Bentham

“ Oh, but the good citizens! what will be come of the good citizens?—What will become of them?—their fate depends upon yourselves. Give up your dominion, you may save them: fight for it, you destroy them. Secure, if you can do it without force, a fair emission of the wishes of all the citizens, if what you call the good citizens are the majority, they will govern: if a minority, they neither will nor ought to govern, but you may give them safety if you please. ”

“ Keep the sugar islands, it is impossible for you to do right:—let go the negroes, you have no sugar, and the reason for keeping these colonies is at end; keep the negroes, you trample upon the declaration of rights, and act in the teeth of principle.—Scruples must have a term: how sugar is raised is what you need not trouble yourselves about, so long as you do not direct the raising it. Reform the world by example, you act generously and wisely: reform the world by force, you might as well reform the moon, and the design is fit only for lunatics. ”

“ Can you take a penny of that income more than they choose to give you? or would you if you could?—We have no such pretension, unless it be over conquered colonies, in our land of what you call imperfect liberty.
Oh, but of this income of theirs a great part centers here: it comes to buy our goods: it constitutes a great part of our trade—all this at least we should lose. Another illusion—Must you govern a people in order to sell your goods to them? Is there that people upon earth who do not buy goods of you? You sell goods to Britain, don't you? And do you govern Britain? ”

“ The good you do will not be confined to yourselves. It will extend to us: I do not mean to our ministry, who affront you, but to the nation, which you most wish to find your friend.—No, there is no end to the good you may do to the world: there is no end to the power that you may exercise over it. By emancipating your own colonies, you may emancipate ours: by setting the example, you may open our eyes and force us to follow it. ”

“ You who look down with so much disdain on our corruption, on our prejudices, on our imperfect liberty, how long will you submit to copy a system, in which corruption and prejudice are in league to destroy liberty?—a compact between government and its colonies, of which the mother country is the sacrifice and the dupe? ”

“ You will, I say, give up your colonies—because you have no right to govern them, because they had rather not be governed by you, because it is against their interest to be governed by you, because you get nothing by governing them, because you can't keep them, because the expence of trying to keep them would be ruinous, because your constitution would suffer by your keeping them, because your principles forbid your keeping them, and because you would do good to all the world by parting with them. ”

“ If you have your lights, they have their prejudices: they may find it not so easy as you may think to comprehend the doctrine of forced liberty: they may prefer a made constitution which gives tranquillity, to an unmade one under which security is yet to come: they may question the right of the thousands who address you, to answer for the millions who are bid to abhor you: they may prefer the George whom they know, to a Frost whom they never heard of.
There is nothing in such courage that is not compatible with the basest cowardice. ”

“ Our acquirements are two small provinces: our sacrifices are besides continental settlements in every quarter of the globe, a multitude of islands, the least of them capable of holding both our acquisitions.—Were such your language, every thing would be explained, every thing set to rights.—While you take what suits you, keeping what does not suit you, you aspire openly to universal domination: with fraternity in your lips, you declare war against mankind. ”

“ Conclude not, that if you cease to maintain tyranny, you have no power to insure justice. Think not, that those who resist oppression, must be deaf to kindness. Set the example of justice, you who if you preferred destruction might use force, set the example of justice, the most perverse will be ashamed not to follow it. ”

“ Oh but they are a great part of our power—Say rather, the whole of your weakness. In your own natural body you are impregnable: in those unnatural excrescences you are vulnerable. Are you attacked at home? not a man can you ever get from them: not a sixpence. Are they attacked? they draw upon you for fleets and armies.
If you were resolved to keep them, could you? it may be worth your consideration. Is it not matter of some doubt, even now when you have been to defend only against themselves: can there be a moment's doubt, when the power of Britain is thrown into the scale? ”

“ Were it possible for monopoly to keep prices lower than they would be otherwise, would it be possible for any body to tell how much lower, and how many sixpences a year were saved to sugar-eaters by so many millions imposed upon the people? No, never: for since, where the monopoly subsists against the producers, there is nothing but the monopoly to prevent accession of, and competition among the producers, competition runs along with the monopoly, and to prove that any part of the effect is produced by the monopoly and not by the competition, is impossible. ”

“ It is not a man's not having sugar to eat that distresses him: Crœsus, Apicius, Heliogabalus had no sugar to eat: what distresses a man, is his not being able to get what he has been used to, or not so much of it as he has been used to. The monopoly against the French Colonies, were it to contribute ever so much to the cheapness of the price, could contribute nothing to the steadiness of it: on the contrary, in consequence of the counter-monopoly it is clogged with, its tendency is to perpetuate the opposite inconvenience, variation. ”

“ In France (it might then be said) people are taxed one way, in the colonies another: the only question would then be about the eligibility of the mode. But revenue is here out of the case: nothing goes to the nation in common, every thing goes to individuals: if it is a tax, it is a tax the produce of which is squandered away before collection; it is a tax the produce of which, instead of being gathered into the treasury, is given away to sugar-eaters.
But even as to sugar-eaters the profit, I say, is an illusion. ”

“ Thus monopoly will not keep down prices.—Hence then comes all the error in favour of monopolies—from not attending to the difference between forcing down prices and keeping them down.
When an article is dear, it is by no means a matter of indifference, whether it is made so by freedom or by force. Dearth which is natural, a misfortune: dearth which is created is a grievance. Suffering takes quite a different colour, when the sense of oppression is mixed with it. ”

“ Illusion!—What is that but doubling the mischief instead of lessening it? To give yourselves a pretence for governing a million or two of strangers, you admit half a dozen. To govern a million or two of people you don't care about, you admit half a dozen people who don't care about you. To govern a set of people whose business you know nothing about, you encumber yourselves with half a dozen starers who know nothing about your's. Is this fraternity? Is this liberty and equality? ”

“ Trade is the child of capital: In proportion to the quantity of capital a country has at its disposal, will, in every country, be the quantity of its trade. While you have no more capital employed in trade than you have, all the power on earth cannot give you more trade: while you have the capital you have, all the power upon earth cannot prevent your having the trade you have. It may take one shape or another shape; it may give you more foreign goods to consume, or more home goods ”

“ They may be better pleased to be governed by you than by any body else; but is it possible they should not be still better pleased to be governed by themselves?—A minority among them might choose rather to be governed by you than by their antagonists, the majority: but is it for you to protect minorities?—A majority, which did not feel itself so strong as it could wish, might wish to borrow a little strength of you:—but for the loan of a moment, would you exact a perpetual annuity of servitude? ”

“ Your own people then have still the faculty of underselling one another without stint, and they have the same inducement to exercise that faculty under the monopoly as they would have without it. It is still the competition that sets the price. In this case as in the other, the monopoly is a chip in porridge. It is still the proportion of the profit of these branches of trade to the average rate of profit in trade that regulates this competition: it is still the quantity of the capital which there is to be employed in trade that regulates the average rate of profit in trade. ”

“ You are chosen by the people: you mean to be so; you are chosen by the most numerous part, who must be the least learned, of the people. This quality, with all its advantages and disadvantages, you the children of the people, must expect more or less to partake of. Inform yourselves as you can, labour as you will, reduce your business as much as you will, you need not fear the finding it too light for you.—What a mountain of arguments and calculations must you have to struggle under, if you persevere in the system of colony-holding with its monopolies and counter-monopolies! ”

“ Is your love for your brethren so much weaker than your hatred of your neighbours?—It would be of use to England.—But are England and king of England terms so perfectly synonymous, and do you of all men think so?—The king's interest would be served by it:—but by knowing a man's interest, his true and lasting interest, are you always certain of his wishes? ”

“ We give ourselves another monopoly—we give ourselves the monopoly of their custom, and so we make them buy things dearer of us than they would otherwise, besides buying things of us which otherwise they would buy of other people, and so we make them pay us for governing them. Mere illusion—In the articles which you can make better and cheaper than foreigners can, which you can furnish them with upon better terms than foreigners can, not a penny do you get in consequence of the monopoly, more than you would without it. ”

“ Upon foreigners the tax is an experiment, and what you risk by the experiment is, the temporary distress to individuals proportioned to the decrease, whatever it be, of that branch of trade: for as to the absolute sum of trade, or to speak more distinctly, of national wealth, it suffers nothing, as you have seen, beyond the amount of the relative and momentary decrease: so that the whole produce of this tax is so much clear gain to the revenue, for which nothing is paid or so much as risked, beyond the above-mentioned momentary and contingent distress to individual traders. ”

“ Are they aristocrats? they hate you. Are they aristocrats? you hate them. For what would you wish to govern a people who hate you? Will they hate you the less for governing them? Are a people the happier for being governed by those they hate? If so, send for the Duke of Brunswick, and seat him on your throne. For what can you wish to govern a people whom you hate? Is it for the pleasure of making them miserable? Is not this copying the Fredericks and the Francis's? Is not this being aristocrats, and aristocrats with a vengeance? ”

“ People in England on the other hand, being so far kept from producing the goods they could have succeeded best in, are in so far turned aside to the production of goods in which they do not succeed so well: and thus it is all the world over. The happiness of mankind is not much impaired perhaps by the difference between wearing goods of one pattern, and goods of another: but, though much is not lost perhaps to any body by the arrangement, what is certain is, that nothing is gained by it to any body, and particularly to France. ”

“ If there were no sugar to be bought, there is at any rate land to be improved. If a hundred pounds worth of sugar be more valuable than a hundred pounds worth of corn, butcher's meat, wine or oil, still corn, butcher's meat, wine and oil are not absolutely without their value. If article after article, you were driven out of every article of your foreign trade, the worst that could happen to you would be the being reduced to lay out so much more than otherwise you would have laid out in the improvement of your land. ”

“ Lower than the price at which the commodity is kept by the average rate of profit on trade in general, no monopoly cam reduce the price of this commodity any more than of any other, for any length of time: you may keep your subjects from selling their sugars elsewhere, but you cannot force them to raise it for you at a loss. Lower than this natural price, no monopoly can ever keep it: down to this price, natural competition cannot fail to reduce it, sooner or later, without monopoly. ”