“The government’s surveillance program,” writes Christopher Cox in Harper’s (subscription required), “is so far removed from what the Fourth Amendment defines as a permissible search … that it’s hard to believe they thought they could get away with it—and still think they can.” He looks to history to illustrate his point:
Two hundred sixty years ago … Shawnees were attacking Englishmen on the American frontier.
The frontier, at the time, was in Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, the colonial assembly voted to raise a militia to fight back, but Governor Robert Hunter Morris rejected the bill because the assembly proposed a tax on all landowners to pay for it. Morris insisted that the legislation exempt the Penn family, who were the largest landowners in the colony (and had appointed him to his position). The assembly, led by Benjamin Franklin, refused to revise the bill.
It may have been the first time an American dispute started with a proposed tax on the rich. It certainly wasn’t the last time the country was threatened by what Franklin, in his Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759), called the “insidious attacks of small parties of skulking murderers.” In Franklin’s account, Morris wanted to be made “provincial dictator” and was exaggerating the threat from the Shawnee and their French allies in order to get his way. (“The populace are never so ripe for mischief as in times of most danger.”) The assembly, in any case, wasn’t persuaded: better to let the frontier burn than accept Morris’s proposal. Their reply to the governor: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Time has edited the phrase to remove the adjectives; Franklin would probably admit that there’s really no such thing as permanent safety or inessential liberty. And its application has shifted over the years. In the eighteenth century, fighting for liberty meant preserving the power of the legislature; today, it means preserving the power of individual citizens to resist the state’s intrusions. But Franklin’s sentiment, made universal, should be the one to guide us in this debate.
The Dish 