Political Inquiries

Robert Coram

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, January-February 1936]

EDITORIAL NOTE: The [following] are excerpts from a volume not previously known to our followers. The author had more than a glimpse of the land question and saw it in many of its implications. He seems to have had a special animus against Blackstone. In this he is somewhat vague and we do not follow him. Maybe a closer reading would make clearer the grounds of his antagonism. Mrs. Emily E. F. Skeel is responsible for the discovery of this book. It was written nearly a hundred years before Progress and Poverty by Robert Coram (1761-1796, entitled Political Inquiries, and was published in one of our Southern States. Editor LAND AND FREEDOM. Coram was born in England and migrated with his family to South Carolina.

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The bulk of mankind were not only cheated out of their right to the soil, but were held ineligible to office in the government, because they were not freeholders. First cruelly to wrest from them the paternal inheritance of their universal Father, and then to make this outrageous act an excuse for denying them the rights of citizenship. This is the history of civil society in which our duty and happiness are so admirably woven together. We will however never believe, that men originally entered into a compact by which they excluded themselves from all right to the bounties of Providence, and if they had, the contract could not be binding on their posterity; for although a man may give away his own right, he cannot give away the right of another.

Merit is but an abortive, useless gift to the possessor, unless accompanied with wealth; he might choose which tree whereon to hang himself, did not his virtuous mind tell him to "dig, beg, rot and perish well content, so he but wrap himself in honest rags at his last gasp, and die in peace." It is a melancholy reflection that in almost all ages and countries, men have been cruelly butchered, for crimes occasioned by the laws; and which they never would have committed had they not been deprived of their natural means of subsistence. But the governors of mankind seem never to have made any allowance for poverty; but like the stupid physician who prescribed bleeding for every disorder, they seem ever to have been distinguished by an amiable thirst for human blood. The altars of a merciful God, have been washed to their foundation, from the veins of miserable men; and the double edged sword of Justice, with all its formality and parade, seems calculated to cut off equally the innocent and guilty. Between religion and law, man has had literally no rest for the sole of his foot.

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Society should furnish the people with means of subsistence, and those means should be an inherited quality in the nature of the government, universal, permanent and uniform, because their natural means were so. ... In the single reign of Henry VIII, we are informed by Harrison, that seventy-two thousand thieves and rogues were hanged in England. How shall we account for this number of executions? Shall we suppose that the English nation at this period, were a pack of thieves, and that every one of this number richly deserved his fate? Or shall we say, that the lives of so many citizens were sacrificed to a wretched and barbarous policy? The latter seems to be the fact.

The lands in England at this time, were held under the feudal system, in large tracts, by lords; the people were called vassals; but the conditions of their servitude were so hard, their yoke so grievous to be borne, that numbers left the service of their lords; but where could they fly? or how were they to provide for subsistence? The cultivation of the soil was denied them, except upon terms too vile and degrading to be accepted; and arts and commerce, which at this day maintain the bulk of the people, were then in their infancy, and probably employed but a small proportion of the people. We despise thieves, not caring to reflect that human nature is always the same; that when it is a man's interest to be a thief, he becomes one; but when it is his interest to support a good character, he becomes an honest man. That even thieves are honest among each other, because it is their interest to be so. We seldom hear of a man in independent circumstances being indicted for petit felony; the man would be an ideot [sic] indeed, who would stake a fair character for a few shillings, which he did not need; but the greatest part of those indicted for petit felonies, are men who have no characters to lose, that is, no substance, which the world always takes for good character.

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Is it any wonder that poverty should be such a formidable terror to civilized nations, when it never meets with quarter, but always with persecution, when both religion and law declare it to be the object of their most implacable hatred and disgust. English vagrant acts, although they are a manifest abuse of civilization, have been hitherto impregnable to the attacks of sound reason and elegant satire. Many English authors have honestly reprobated them; Mr. Fielding in several of his novels, has highly ridiculed them; and Doctor Goldsmith has exposed them in a vein of inimitable satire, in his history of a poor soldier. Pity such philosophers were not magistrates! "In vain," says Raynal, "does custom, prejudice, ignorance and hard labor stupify the lower class of mankind, so as to render them insensible of their degradation; neither religion nor morality can hinder them from seeing, and feeling, the injustice of the arrangements of policy in the distribution of good and evil."