Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

William Burke's Examination of the Commercial Principles. . . , again
calling for yielding Canada and the North American lands and to retain
the sugar islands. Also influential was the similar Letter to , . . the City of
London by George Heathcote, M.P., a radical Whig or "Commonwealthman."
Temple's papers, taking a continued Pitt or Whig tone in opposition to the
peace terms, drew down the wrath of the government, which prepared a
general warrant in early November against both the Monitor and the North
Briton. In a February 1763 issue of the North Briton, which took essentially
the Newcastle-Whig line on the peace treaty, John Wilkes had denounced
the ceding of the sugar islands in the West Indies, instead of the
vast, expensively maintained tracts in Canada and Florida.
Henry Fox's shrewd management of the peace treaty, however, made this
suppression unnecessary, and the general warrant remained unused. William
Pitt, in his speech on the treaty, raved and ranted of the absolute
necessity of the destruction of France, and for that purpose of retaining
the fishing monopoly. By placing his opposition in these war-mad terms,
Pitt drove many of the Whigs into lukewarm support of the treaty.
At the end of December, in the "massacre of the Pelham innocents," Fox
engineered the ouster of all the Whigs holding public office, for daring to
oppose the peace terms. Newcastle had always been friendly to opposition
expressed by popular mobs, and he now spurred a vigorous Whig opposition
to the increasingly Tory rule. John Wilkes wrote enthusiastically in
the North Briton of December 25 that every "friend of liberty and of
revolution principles" had been dismissed, and they must from now on
depend on the people. In a six-part critique of Toryism and Tory rule,
Wilkes thundered that "the Tory faction is triumphant, and the most
slavish doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance is preached up
by every pamphleteer and . . . insisted upon by an all-grasping minister."
The Whig party was now at a fateful crossroads; it either had to go
into vigorous liberal opposition to the administration, or, in effect, had to
abandon all of its Whig principles and crawl back into government office.
The Whigs polarized. Hardwicke, the Yorke family, and Newcastle's
nephew Charles Townshend, along with other conservatives, refused to
form a vigorous opposition; whereas the more radical and principled Whigs
(especially the Whig youth), headed by the Marquis of Rockingham,
formed an opposition "club" with the rather worried blessing of the aging
Newcastle. But the reconstituted Whig Club suffered gravely from the lack
of a strong leader in the House of Commons.
For its part, the administration felt it necessary to push aggressive expansion
and rule in the new American lands in order to justify its own
peace terms.
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