1793 Benjamin Vaughan. The Concert of Princes, Dismemberment of Poland & France

Description:

G. G. & J. and J. Robinson, London, 1793, Stated Second Edition.
Full calf hard covers with gilt spine title and decoration, octavo, 391 pages including Appendix.

Benjamin Vaughan was born in Jamaica, West Indies. His family emigrated to England where he attended Newcome School in Hackney near London, Lincoln's Inn, a college of law, then a school in Liverpool where he was tutored by Joseph Priestly (the discoverer of oxygen) and later in Edinburgh where he studied medicine and graduated in 1781. He was a life-long friend of Benjamin Franklin and was involved in negotiations for peace between England and the United States in 1782 during the American Revolution. He lived in France and in Switzerland, then finally settled on his mother's family's property along the Kennebec River in Maine, eventually called Hallowell. At the time, his personal library was larger that that of Harvard University. He practiced medicine as well as building houses, mills, stores, a distillery, a brewery and a printing office in Hallowell. He published political articles and wrote a historical paper concerning the Northeast Boundary of the U.S. at the request of President John Adams.


CRITICAL REVIEW. MAY, 1794.
?Letters, on the Subject of the Concert of Princes, and the Dis-memberment of Poland and France. {First published in the Morning Chronicle betvJeen July 20, 1792, and June 25, 1793.) With Co rections and Additions. By a Calm Observer. 8vo. $s. Boards. Robinsons. 1793.

^WHILE the press daily teems with political pamphlets, overflowing with loose declamation, or dictated by intemperate heat, or fabricated for interested purposes, the friends of liberty and of peace have perused with peculiar pleasure a series of letters in which found reasoning is joined to brilliancy of expression, and accurate information to dispassionate candour. Whoever the Calm Observer may be, he has a right to the appellation he has assumed, and his post of observation must be a favourable one, since it commands a long reach of the politics and prospects of the greater part of European potentates. These Letters are now republished from the Morning Chronicle, in which they appeared between July 1792 and June 1793. During all that eventful period they were sounding in . our ears like a warning voice, nor have any of the events which have happened since, tended to discredit their sagacitv, or to render less desireable the object they recommend. They are somewhat shortened from their original form by the omission of some letters and parts of letters, not so immediately relative to the general subject, and perhaps would have had a better appearance as a whole, if the Appendix, Preface, and Postcript, bad been brought into the body of the publication.

The arguments of the Calm Observer are directed to prove, that there exists between the three powers of Austria, Russia, and Prussia, a most formidable league for mutual aggrandizement, and that they have pursued this object for some time with unremitting attention, and with a success which ought to make them an object of suspicion to the rest of Europe, a league which is equally directed against the internal liberty of each particular state, and the external liberty of their neighbours in general. On this head he observes:

The liberties of man, and consequently the progress of sciences of civilization, and the arts, have already enough to contend with in every state, viewed separately. Whenever the powers invested in government for useful purposes, become abused to ambitious ones, in vain do individuals seek to resist a great collective force instituted hy themselves. Despair sometimes produces a counter-union of like subjects, but as it commonly ends in an alteration of rulers, rather than of principles, the evil complained of soon recurs. Hence there are few 'good governments in the world; so few, that our own nation thinks itself in possession of the only one; and even this has required more than one successful revolution to produce, or to preserve its perfection. Such then, is the state of every single country, even when the domestic enemy to its happiness has none except the forces of his own nation, at his disposal. ?But a new scene at the present moment opens itself. Several princes have agreed mutually to lend to one another the powers respectivelv intrusted to them for national objects, in order that each may thence'be enabled to enforce his respective pleasure upon his respective people. In other words, they engage to bring the military forces and the revenues of all nations, to act, when requisite, upon the people of any single nation; although that people has already enough to struggle with at home, "whenever its own pubiic force is applied to support tyranny. As a counter-concert among the people of different nations is impossible, it is henceforth then intended, that princes shall legislate at their own discretion; and ihat no nation shall ever be able to right its own wrongs; the example of Poland even proving, that when a prince is disposed to concur with his own people in improving the constitution of the nation, permission is to be denied even for a measure of mutual happiness. ?Each nation is, therefore, to be considered as designed to be governed by an enemy within, and an enemy without; and every order in society, whether civil or religious, is to vanish before a union of military despotism.'
(From The Critical Review, Or, Annals of Literature, 1794)

Benjamin Vaughan MD LLD (19 April 1751 ? 8 December 1835) was a British political radical. He was a commissioner in the negotiations between Britain and the United States and the drafting of the Treaty of Paris.

Life
Vaughan was born in Jamaica to Samuel Vaughan, a British West India merchant planter, and an Anglo-American mother Sarah Hallowell. He was educated at Newcome's School and Warrington Academy and attended Trinity Hall, Cambridge, without graduating. He then read medicine at the University of Edinburgh. His interest was in politics and sciences: the latter led to his friendship with Benjamin Franklin.

Vaughan was a political economist, merchant and medical doctor. Through Benjamin Horne, brother of John Horne, he met the politician Lord Shelburne.[3] Shelburne then used Vaughan in a diplomatic role, to try to bring peace between Great Britain and the United States, towards the end of the American War of Independence. He was also a middleman in reconciling Franklin and Shelburne.

He was elected at a by-election in 1792 as a Member of Parliament (MP) for the borough of Calne in Wiltshire, and held the seat until the 1796 general election. He spoke in parliament in defence of slavery in Jamaica, in his maiden speech. By 1794 he was in favour of the abolition of the slave trade.

After 1794, Vaughan left France for Switzerland and later to America. His interest in republicanism lead to his permanent departure from Britain. He settled in Boston and then on a farm in Hallowell, Maine in 1797. In 1805, Vaughan was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1813, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. He died in Hallowell in 1835. John Vaughan (wine merchant) was his brother.?