Page:Bertram David Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, William Francis Dunne - Our Heritage from 1776 (1926).pdf/6

 4 stands, it is because "pursuing" does not necessarily mean catching up. If, in the pursuit of your happiness, you find that you have to picket a shop, you may find that your "inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness" may be taken away from you also.

But in this the revolution of 1776 is no exception to other bourgeois revolutions of which Engels wrote: "We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this Eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason. … came into being and could only come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the eighteenth century could not. … go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch."

But as soon as we have said that the Revolution of 1776 was a class revolution which produced certain class institutions and which made many promises which it did not and could not fulfill, then we have cleared the ground for a closer examination of the real nature of the revolution, the things it achieved and the things it represents.

The dominant class in England at the time of the Revolution of 1776 held to the mercantilist economic theory that colonies exist to produce raw materials for the mother country and to provide markets for its manufactured goods. During the latter part of the colonial period a whole series of laws were adopted by Parliament regulating the shipping trade and manufactures of the colonies in such a way as to foster the commercial and business interests of England. The Navigation Acts, framed for the purpose of building up the British merchant marine and navy, gave a monopoly of colonial commerce to British ships. The Factory Acts forbade the manufacture of hats, woolens and iron, and the exportation of such manufactured articles. The Trade Laws compelled the colonists to export certain goods to England only, and to purchase certain other things only in England. Prohibitive taxes were placed upon other articles when not imported from Eng-