![]() ![]() The difference between what he meant and what we remember him as saying perfectly encapsulates our tendency to mangle intellectually the true relationship between liberty and security. Notwithstanding the way the quotation has come down to us, Franklin saw the liberty and security interests of Pennsylvanians as aligned. He was describing, rather, effective self-government in the service of security as the very liberty it would be contemptible to trade. ![]() In short, Franklin was not describing a tension between government power and individual liberty. Franklin was thus complaining of the choice facing the legislature between being able to make funds available for defense and maintaining its right of self-government-and he was criticizing the governor for suggesting that it should be willing to give up the latter to ensure the former. And the Penn family later offered cash to fund defense of the frontier-as long as the Assembly would acknowledge that it lacked the power to tax the family’s lands. The governor was accusing the Assembly of stalling on appropriating money for frontier defense by insisting on including the Penn lands in its taxes and thus triggering his intervention. And the “purchase a little temporary safety” of which Franklin complained was not the ceding of power to some government Leviathan in exchange for a promise of protection from external threat for in Franklin’s letter, the word “purchase” does not appear to have been a metaphor. The “essential liberty” to which Franklin referred was not what we would think of today as civil liberties but, rather, the right of self-governance of a legislature in the interests of collective security. The governor kept vetoing the Assembly’s efforts at the behest of the family, which had appointed him and did not want its lands taxed. The letter was a salvo in a power struggle between the governor and the Assembly over funding for security on the frontier, one in which the Assembly wished to tax the lands of the Penn family, which ruled Pennsylvania from afar, to raise money for defense against French and Indian attacks. They appear originally in a 1755 letter Franklin is presumed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the colonial governor during the French and Indian War. Very few people who quote these words, however, have any idea where they come from or what Franklin was really saying when he wrote them. And every lover of liberty has pondered them, knowing that they speak to that great truth about the constitution of civilized governments: that we empower government to protect us in a devil’s bargain from which we will lose in the long run. Every student of American history knows them. They are quoted endlessly by those who assert that these two values coexist with one another in a precarious, ever-shifting state of balance that security concerns threaten constantly to upset. A version of them appears on a plaque in the Statue of Liberty. They are perhaps the most famous words ever written about the relationship between liberty and security. “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” -Benjamin Franklin ![]()
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