Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

legislation, whereas the king had no veto over acts of Parliament; (b) the
governors had the legal right to delay or dissolve the legislatures, whereas
the king had lost that power in Britain; and (c) the governors constituted
the supreme judicial power in the colonies, while the Crown had been forced
to accept independent judges in Britain.
How, then, the accretion of power to the executive in Britain, accompanied
by its decline in the colonies? Bailyn answered that the crucial
difference between the two was what English libertarians of the day denounced
as corruption—the ability of the Crown and its ministers to buy
up, to put it bluntly, the will of Parliament. In Britain, the patronage at the
control of the Crown was enormous, enabling the ministers to purchase
parliamentary support. As Bailyn points out, in Britain
some boroughs—twenty-five or thirty—were owned outright by the government
in the sense that a majority of their electorates were officeholders who
could be dismissed if they opposed the government; in others the election of
members favorable to the government could be assured by the proper
application of electioneering funds. Beyond this, control of the House was
assured by the distribution of the crown patronage available to any administration
and by the management of the corps of placemen that resulted. In
the middle of the eighteenth century about 200 of the 558 members of the
House of Commons held crown places of one sort or another, and another
thirty or forty were more loosely tied to government by awards of profitable
contracts. Of those who held places, forty at least held offices intimately
involved in the government and were absolutely reliable. The other 160 held
a variety of sinecures, household offices, pensions, and military posts which
brought them well within the grasp of the administration but yet required
constant solicitation and management. A fluctuating number of other members
were bound to the government less directly, particularly by the gift to
their nominees of one or more of the 8,000 excise offices available.*
Bailyn concludes that for executive dominance of the legislature, several
preconditions had to exist: notably, the existence of an abundance of patronage
and places; and a strictly limited franchise, "for the larger the voting
population the greater the government's difficulty in controlling elections."
England, with a mass of patronage at the disposal of the Crown, its severely
limited franchise, and a plethora of "rotten" and "pocket" boroughs represented
in Parliament, had these conditions in abundance in the eighteenth
century. But, Bailyn points out, these preconditions for executive control
and manipulation of the legislature were conspicuous by their absence in
the American colonies. While the governors began with limited but yet
extensive patronage powers, they were systematically stripped of them by
royal prescription and, most importantly, by the alert and continuing pressure
'Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Random House,
l9fi8), pp. 28-2?.
203