Benjamin Franklin: “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

This satire's itemization of American grievances toward Great Britain is among the best such elaborations written prior to the Declaration of Independence. A comparison of the two documents suggests that the United States owed much to Benjamin Franklin's identifying and explaining why the American colonies were effectively being driven out of the British Empire. Rarely did the author achieve a more powerful phrasing of exactly what angered Americans. The logical consequence of all that Franklin enumerates is revolution. When he wrote this document, presented in the Public Advertiser in September 1773, his hopes for a great empire in which Americans were equal to the English still lingered in him, but as a pragmatic man he had come to see himself and other Americans as a people separate from the English.

The satire imagines that there were a set of instructions given to the Earl of Hillsborough (Wills Hill, first Marquess of Downshire), Great Britain's minister in charge of affairs with the American colonies, at the moment he took office. The voice of “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One” is distinctly Franklin's, written in a robust, direct manner that he may have intended to represent the way liberated Americans should speak. In its bitterness and anger, it echoes “Exporting of Felons to the Colonies.” In its detailed accounts of injustices, every American could see expressed with clarity what he or she had in common with other Americans in their desire for liberty and fairness.

Franklin itemizes the Americans' grievances, assigning them Roman numerals from one to twenty. The result is a nuanced work that defies quick reading. The first point is simple enough: To diminish an empire, begin by alienating the outer fringes of the empire. The second point strikes at the heart of Franklin's disappointments with Great Britain. He had long harbored a vision of the British Empire as greater than it was; in this vision the colonies of Great Britain would become integral, equal parts of the empire, with a parliament elected by English subjects equally from former colonies that had become as much a part of the homeland as England itself. He saw in Great Britain's behavior a failure of foresight that was leading to catastrophe, as the colonists were made to feel like aliens rather than fellow countrymen. In the third and fourth points, Franklin notes reasons why colonists are deserving of the respect of the motherland, having built a society themselves, at their own expense and risk, even while showing love and friendship toward Great Britain.

In the fifth through twentieth points, Franklin notes the conduct of Great Britain's government that has pushed Americans into reluctantly believing that their best interests would be served by being a people independent of Great Britain. He notes the broad perception that the justice system imposed by the British government is unfair, with foreign judges, many incompetent or criminals themselves, running the trials of Americans; he notes the misrule and corruption of governors imposed on colonies; he notes the injustice of taxes imposed by a parliament in which the colonies are not represented; he notes that the American people had given much willingly to the defense of the realm.

That the ideas that would be embodied in the Bill of Rights were being promulgated prior to America's Declaration of Independence is well demonstrated in the tenth point, in which Franklin writes that while Americans thought they should be protected by the English constitution, they were being denied such rights as habeas corpus and freedom to choose one's own religion. The phrase “that they are at present under a power something like that spoken of in the scriptures, which can not only kill their bodies, but damn their souls to all eternity, by compelling them, if it pleases, to worship the Devil” draws deeply from American anger and typifies the power of the satire as a whole. The eleventh through fourteenth points expand on the ways in which tax collection has been made odious and the mother country has actively thwarted justice in the colonies. The foolish conduct of Great Britain's government has made Americans an oppressed people.