Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

wise enough to know that an inactive and sluggish—and therefore harmless
—government implied an active and thriving citizenry.
Under Walpole not only did the Board of Trade become quiet and inactive,
but also the once powerful Privy Council became an innocuous and
virtually honorary body. The colonies were governed by one of Britain's two
secretaries of state—the secretary of state for the Southern Department. His
foreign duties included not only all the colonies but France and southern
Europe as well. Under Walpole's rule, the American colonies found to their
delight that the numerous mercantile regulations, prohibitions, and dictates
were simply not being enforced. One reason was Walpole's happy instincts
for letting men be free to administer their own affairs, as well as his insight
that colonial trade needed to be let alone rather than regulated and restrained.
Another reason was the heavy burdens laid upon the secretary
of state. The third was Walpole's inspired choice for secretary of state for
the South. This was young Thomas Holies Pelham, Duke of Newcastle.
Willing and eager to leave the colonies alone so long as he could control
the patronage of his office, Newcastle pursued a policy of what was later
happily conceptualized by Edmund Burke as "salutary neglect." Under Newcastle,
delighted Americans found that the onerous regulations, restrictions,
and charges upon them were simply not being attended to. Newcastle
brought the activists of the British colonial administration to despair as
messages piled up on his desk unread and unheeded. Newcastle has too often
been written off as a dolt by historians. Better would be the explanation that
he was close to the moderately liberal Whig intellectuals of St. John's College,
Cambridge, where Master John Newcome kept alive a tradition of
civil liberty and of Locke and Newton. Newcome's nephew, Bishop Samuel
Squire—also an historian, and educated at St. John's—became Newcastle's
chaplain and private secretary. Particularly beloved in the colonies was John
Lord Monson, president of the Board of Trade in the 1740s, who magnificently
refused even to submit colonial business to higher authorities or
to make any recommendations whatever on colonial affairs.
Apart from the Navigation Acts, other imperial restrictions on the colonies
were designed to cripple any threatened growth in manufactures that
might compete successfully with English firms. As woolen factories began
to develop in New England and on Long Island in effective competition
with English woolens, England passed the Wool Act in 1699, viciously
prohibiting any exportation of raw wool or of finished woolens to any other
colony—or to England. Woolen goods in this period constituted the largest
single item (over one-half) of British exports to the American colonies,
and the British manufacturers were anxious to shore up their position. Although
it is easier to enforce restrictions on manufacturing than on the more
mobile commerce, and although the Wool Act blighted the development of
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