that the effort after change is worse than the evil of which men complain.  His Treatise on Civil Government (1781) is in many ways a delightful book, bluff, hardy, full of common sense, with, at times, a quaint humor that is all its own.  He had really two objects in view; to deal, in the first place, faithfully with the American problem, and, in the second, to explode the new bubble of Rousseau’s followers.  The second point takes the form of an examination of Locke, to whom, as Tucker shrewdly saw, the theories of the school may trace their ancestry.  He analyses the theory of consent in such fashion as to show that if its adherents could be persuaded to be logical, they would have to admit themselves anarchists.  He has no sympathy with the state of nature; the noble savage, on investigation, turns out to be a barbaric creature with a club and scalping knife.  Government, he does not doubt, is a trust, or, as he prefers, somewhat oddly, to call it, a quasi-contract; but that does not mean that the actual governors can be dismissed when any eccentric happens to take exception to their views.  He has no sympathy with parliamentary reform.  Give the mob an increase of power, he says, and nothing is to be expected but outrage and violence.  He thinks the constitution very well as it is, and those who preach the evils of corruption ought to prove their charges instead of blasphemously asserting that the voice of the people is the voice of God.

Upon America Tucker has doctrines all his own.  He does not doubt that the Americans deserve the worst epithets that can be showered upon them.  Their right to self-government he denied as stoutly as ever George III himself could have desired.  But not for one moment would he fight them to compel their return to British allegiance.  If the American colonies want to go, let them by all means cut adrift.  They are only a useless source of expenditure.  The trade they represent does not depend upon allegiance but upon wants that England can supply if she keeps shop in the proper way, if, that is, she makes it to their interest to buy in her market.  Indeed, colonies of all kinds seem to him quite useless.  They ever are, he says, and ever were, “a drain to and an incumbrance on the Mother-country, requiring perpetual and expensive nursing in their infancy, and becoming headstrong and ungovernable in proportion as they grow up.”  All wise relations depend upon self-interest, and that needs no compulsion.  If Gibraltar and Port Mahon and the rest were given up, the result would be “multitudes of places ... abolished, jobs and contracts effectually prevented, millions of money saved, universal industry encouraged, and the influence of the Crown reduced to that mediocrity it ought to have.”  Here is pure Manchesterism half-a-century before its time; and one can imagine the good Dean crustily explaining his notions to the merchants of Bristol who had just rejected Edmund Burke for advocating free trade with Ireland.