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On February 6 in 1820 something really foolish happened. Which of course does not distinguish it from any other day on the calendar. But this one is a fairly trivial incident in itself that manages at the same time to be a historical whopper.

It is the departure from New York of the Elizabeth, bound for Liberia in West Africa with three white American Colonization Society members and 88 American blacks to solve the whole vexed slavery question by sending freed slaves back to West Africa to establish their own country.

It is hard to overestimate the foolishness of the venture. The fact that all the ACS members and a quarter of the blacks were dead within three weeks from yellow fever while the rest fled back to Sierre Leone to await reinforcements gives you some idea of the early difficulties although to be fair Jamestown was sort of like that too and it worked out eventually.

Liberia never could, in a very fundamental sense. The colony not only survived but prospered, and might have done better still if better-prepared settlers had succeeded in creating a genuine self-governing republic. And if so it might have done considerable good in demonstrating what American slaves could do, and be, once the shackles were struck off.

It failed even at that, as the descendants of the colonists formed a closed elite that subjugated the indigenous population; in rather ghastly typical African fashion it is not even certain when the latter got the vote. So it failed as an example. But Liberia was meant to do more than that.

It was meant to solve America’s slavery problem by exporting it. It was meant to permit emancipation by bigots and among bigots, by promising that once freed the blacks would be sent far away where Americans would not have to put up with them. It was always logistically impossible because there was obviously no way to transport millions of people across the Atlantic with tools and other necessities (there were then nearly 2 million American slaves and 200,000 free blacks) even if they could all have been freed. Dragging them to the New World as naked slaves, with high mortality rates on the dreadful "Middle Passage," was technically feasible if morally repellent. Doing the reverse was morally repellent and technically impossible.

The moral repellence was the worst thing of all. Some ACS members were genuinely unprejudiced but figured that until their countrymen and women had a change of heart the best bet for the freedman or woman was to get to a country not run by whites, as Liberia was not after 1847. Others were benevolent by the standards of the day in rejecting slavery but failed to embrace equality, while a few actually felt colonization was a deft trick for getting rid of troublemaking free blacks to help keep slaves more docile and thus preserve the "peculiar institution".

I know it is easy to say from this distance. But the only proper solution to slavery was to accept that all men are created equal, and to reject both the legal and the social subjugation of any race. If it had been necessary to proceed by abolishing the legal subjugation first and then moving on to the social, I think it would have been an acceptable second best. But nothing good was going to happen as long as people insisted that blacks were inferior and based their solutions on that premise, whether or not those solutions they were as technically absurd as sending them all to West Africa one shipload at a time. Even those genuinely unbigoted ACS members who bowed to their neighbours’ prejudice, though they come out of the story looking a lot better than anyone else, let pragmatism trump principle in ways that ultimately failed badly as they generally do.

Whatever the Liberian colonization experiment did, it utterly failed to solve the problem of American racial slavery that erupted into the internecine Civil War and even once it was done left a poisonous legacy of segregation, injustice and bitterness. As anyone capable of math, let alone moral reasoning, would have known would happen.

On February 5 of 1852 Russia’s New Hermitage Museum opened to the public. It was already impressive then, and despite or even because of the Bolshevik Revolution became more impressive still as items from around Russia were added. It remains one of the world’s great museums especially for its art. But its story is not altogether a happy one.

From its beginnings under Catherine the Great in 1754 it has held impressive pieces, a tribute to the power of autocrats and tyrants to extract wealth even from an impoverished populace and spend it on the trappings of culture. Catherine herself acquired literally thousands of old masters, along with engraved gems, drawings and so forth. But her people were starving. And as with the infamous Potemkin villages, such museums in the glittering if slave-labour-built Tsarist capital of St. Petersburg convinced not only foreigners but even its rulers that Russia was indeed keeping up with the West.

Unfortunately it was not. Within three years of the opening of the Hermitage, Russia would lose the Crimean war right in its front yard to Britain and France despite the glaring inadequacies of both their military efforts. And this evidence of insufficient or even failed modernization precipitated a half century of halting reform, inept reaction and upheaval that culminated in the disastrous collapse during World War I into communism during which the Tsars continued to pour out treasure on art and other artefacts.

The Bolsheviks in turn made the museum even more impressive, looting Tsarist and aristocratic palaces and adding their possessions to the now state facility. Stalin later secretly sold thousands of works to help finance his forced industrialization. And then the Soviets added art looted by the Red Army in the closing part of the Second World War, although they kept it hidden until after the fall of the USSR, a dubious contribution to culture. But they never gave it back, which is more than a bit uncultured, and even cancelled a planned 2013 visit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel because of the danger that she would mention this subject. Especially ironic in that the exhibit she was meant to visit along with Vladimir Putin had the friendly title "Bronze Age of Europe: Europe Without Borders".

Visiting the Hermitage at any point after 1852 one might have felt that was in an institution very similar to the British Museum right down to the impressive Egyptian antiquities. But it was not, right down to the fact that the British Museum was privately founded and has never been a mere branch of the government. And the impression to the contrary has been part of a far larger misconception about the extent to which forced cultural acquisition, like forced industrialization, is an adequate or even superior alternative to the real, spontaneous thing.

In my latest article for Convivium, a Cardus publication, I argue that whatever the merits of Canadian government today, and the society it has sought to create in its image, we are not now where Canada was always intended and indeed destined by History to end up for the edification of all humankind.

My latest for The Rebel:

On February 2, 1653, New Amsterdam was incorporated. What a great story.

Huh? Does it lack the steamy drama we have come to demand? Even if we know, from the song Istanbul or elsewhere, that New Amsterdam was later renamed New York City which, if you like big cities, remains one of civilization’s jewels? Well, let me try to defend this admittedly un-bodice-ripper-like choice of theme.

I have commented before on the stunning military, economic and cultural imbalance between Western Europe and the rest of the world by 1500 that led a speck of land like the Netherlands become a global empire. (No offense to the Dutch; I actually mean it as a compliment. But nobody looking at the Netherlands and India in 1450 would have thought the former would start picking off bits of the latter within two centuries including fighting Portugal for them.) But there’s more, or rather, there’s a side to the story that helps explain why the imbalance was so enormous. And it’s precisely the incorporation of municipalities with genuine legal rights and "liberties" in places like England and the Netherlands.

New Amsterdam itself was founded as a political entity, unsurprisingly, in 1625. It was the seat of the colonial government of New Netherland. But the "factorij" outside the fort, though protected by and closely associated with it, was a private venture. As were earlier Dutch ventures including in what would later be Albany and, not coincidentally, the various early English colonies from Massachusetts Bay to Jamestown. Indeed, New Netherland itself was originally a private venture of a sort Emperors and Tsars would not tolerate or keep their plundering hands off if they prospered.

By the way, you’ve all heard of the infamous purchase of Manhattan for 60 guilders or 24 Spanish dollars from a Lenape Indian chief who supposedly did not know what the cunning Europeans were up to. It casts a rather different light on that hackneyed tale of naivety and perfidy to learn that at the time the island was apparently mostly in the hands of a rival band. So chief Seyseys shrewdly swindled the Dutch by selling them someone else’s land.)

It was still a small settlement, under 300 people in the 1640s. Life was hard and survival uncertain. But people do things the way they think proper even in adversity, and hence in 1653 New Amsterdam became a city with, crucially, municipal rights. Not just duties. Not paper promises. Real genuine legal guarantees of their right to make decisions and live with the consequences without sudden arbitrary deprivation. (Not entirely coincidentally, the first Jews seem to have arrived in 1654.) Two years later, on September 15, 1655, a massive Indian attack destroyed farms and killed around 100 people while carrying off another 150. But the colony rebounded.

After a bunch of rhubarb New Amsterdam of course wound up in the hands of the English and later the Americans. But in the big picture there is far more similarity than difference in how the Dutch and English treated their citizens and their political and economic rights, namely with respect. And it gave their nations, and their settlements, a dynamism not found elsewhere.

Had New Amsterdam been New Moscow, New Teheran or New Beijing we would not be having this discussion. Which is a major reason it wasn’t.

"The form of government based on representation, which now gives the political life of the whole civilized world its peculiar character, goes back in its historic origin to the medieval Estates-system of government." Otto Hintze in Bertie Wilkinson The Creation of Mediaeval Parliaments

On this date in history, Feb. 1 Taiwan was conquered by China. Which is worth noting because the current regime in Beijing dreams of a replay.

It’s also therefore worth noting that it happened as recently, historically speaking, as 1662. And that it required a nine-month siege and was followed by a far from smooth process of filling the island with mainlanders and driving the original inhabitants into the hills or assimilating them.

Some Chinese might nevertheless take pride in the successful 1662 invasion since it took Taiwan back from the Dutch East India Company which could hardly claim to be indigenous and which was unpopular in part at least for suppressing local traditions like head-hunting. But it does not establish as an incontrovertible tenet of international law or morality that China and Taiwan must always be one country.

Now it is also true that since the Chinese conquest, the island was essentially taken over by mainlanders, the aboriginals now being about 2% of the population. But the key point is that the claim that Taiwan has always been part of China is untrue.

It was not part of China before 1662, nor after 1895 when Japan took it. Which I’m not excusing, especially given the aggressive intolerance of Imperial Japan. But I am pointing out that only for 333 years from the 17^th to the 19th centuries, and a further four between the defeat of Japan in the Second World War and the ousting of the Chinese Nationalists from the mainland in 1949, was Taiwan part of China.

If you take the semi-Wilsonian view that nations must be ethnically pure to avoid war, and that all members of a given ethnicity ought to be members of a single nation, then it makes sense that Taiwan and China should be reunited. Ideally, I would say, under the democratic free enterprise government of the former rather than the Communist tyrants in Beijing. And they might legitimately be unified it if is the will of the inhabitants of both established in successful referendums. But otherwise the desire of one big country to swallow another smaller one is aggression even if the people of the bigger country are generally for it. And if you do not subscribe to the ethnic purity theory of nationhood, there is no real logic to the argument that Taiwan and China must be one country so it’s OK to do it by force.

That Communists falsify history to justify military adventurism does not qualify as such logic should go without saying. These days apparently it has to be said anyway.

On January 31 of 1801, lame-duck U.S. President John Adams appointed John Marshall Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Such appointments often backfire; Eisenhower would later bitterly regret elevating Earl Warren to Marshall’s old job. And at the time it was largely seen through the partisan lens of Adams’ effort to stack the judiciary against his hated rival Thomas Jefferson. But it turned out to be one of the greatest appointments in American history.

Adams had originally offered the job to another leading member of what was fast becoming the Federalist party, John Jay. But Jay turned it down partly on the grounds that the Supreme Court had insufficient "energy, weight, and dignity." Which might sound like a weird thing to say given the importance of the judiciary in the American system of checks and balances. But it was in fact not clear in 1801 that the Court was an equal branch or that it could, in fact, invalidate statutes as unconstitutional.

It was Marshall himself, whose skilful and congenial guidance included changing the practice of each judge issuing his own opinion to the presentation of a majority or even unanimous consensus, who made the Court what it has been since. And the critical turning point was Marbury v Madison in 1803 in which a unanimous Court struck down portions of the Judiciary Act of 1789 as unconstitutional.

It was, interestingly, the only time in his 35 years as Chief Justice that the Marshall Court declared an Act of Congress unconstitutional. And it was one whose practical impact pleased the incumbent President and Congress even though they were Jeffersonian Republican foes of the Federalist Party, which probably helped it avoid becoming a focus for partisan wrangling. But however that may be, it was a crucial step in the evolution of the American system to the point that one prominent constitutional scholar declared that only when Marshall finished reading the court’s opinion in Marbury v Madison was the Grand Convention that wrote the Constitutional entirely adjourned.

As for John Adams, who spent a long and productive life in service of his country, he later said "My gift of John Marshall to the people of the United States was the proudest act of my life." It may also have been his most effective.