Lord Black’s 4th

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Such was the miscarriage of justice Conrad Black suffered in American courts — which sent him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit (and, indeed, the Supreme Court unanimously concluded didn’t exist) — that the press baron has a good bit of running room before the score is settled in America’s favor. And by God we love him, not only for encouraging this newspaper, of which he was a founding director, but for his capacious spirit and the friendship he has maintained for America throughout it all. One would have to search the Lords a long way back to find a friend of America as fast.

Our sentiments, however, do not extend to George III, the tyrant on whom Lord Black, in a column issued on this Independence Day, puts the gloss. He reckons that the tax the mad monarch was attempting to collect was “not in an excessive amount and was not an unwarranted ambition.” In His Lordship’s telling, the British had almost doubled their national debt during a French and Indian War the “principal British object” of which was to “evict France from North America,” without which, Black adds, “American independence would not have been feasible.”

In other words, in our friend’s telling, George III was practically one of the Minutemen. It’s a wonder he wasn’t along on Paul Revere’s ride. The column prompted us to phone Ira Stoll, the leading biographer of the most radical of the American revolutionaries, Samuel Adams. We reached our erstwhile colleague as he was motoring to his vacation spot with his family. When we put to him Black’s suggestion that the Stamp Act was not such a heinous intrusion, he declared that maybe we ought to impose a stamp tax on the Canadians without giving them representation.

Mr. Stoll also reminded us of his column, issued in 2011, on the more general phenomenon of the revisionists of the Revolution emerging not only on the left — which has long carped about the American founding — but also on the right, where a number of important voices have begun to say things that would have made Geo. Washington’s blood boil. This gamut runs from David Pryce-Jones, who wrote Treason of the Heart, to a Brooklyn-based rabbi who has asserted that the “stupid introduction to the Declaration of Independence, that pretentious, idiotic, self-absorbed nonsense about ‘certain unalienable rights’” is “precisely where we went wrong.”

Lord Black doesn’t go that far, or anywhere near it. He concludes by saying that the Yanks “had the better part of the 1776 argument — that, as the leading British statesmen of the time, Pitt the Elder, Charles James Fox, and Edmund Burke,* noisily asserted, the American complaints were well-founded and the king’s policy was, indeed, insane.” He suggests that had Pitt, Fox, and Burke prevailed, “the United States would probably today rule Britain and much of her former empire, including the treasure houses of Canada and Australia, thus increasing the present American population by 40 percent and tripling the natural resources of the United States.”

It is not in America’s character, however, to want to rule the rest of the world, or even the English-speaking part of it, as we’ve shown over and over again, as recently as Iraq and Afghanistan. Even so it strikes us as a fact to savor that there’s a member of the House of Lords prepared to state that “Americans are right to celebrate July 4” and to declare that the “ensuing revolution and the representation of it as the dawn of human liberty have provided America with a powerful ethos, appropriate to the great country that it is.”

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* Burke may be one of the patron saints of the conservative movement, but he was far from perfect; he’d have sent Samuel Adams to the gallows.


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