As Cato, Trenchard and Gordon dealt in analogies and archetypes to defend their idea of good government. If Britons were to maintain their political stability, then they had to preserve their unwritten constitution that, through checks and balances, guaranteed liberty. Gordon and Trenchard took on the persona of “Cato” to attack the South Sea Bubble and expose the corruption of party rule. “The same Principles of Nature and Reason that supported liberty at Rome, must support it here and every where,” he counseled, “however the Circumstances of adjusting them may vary in different Places as the Foundations of Tyranny are in all Countries, and at all Times, essentially the same.” 6 In preparing his February 1774 will he wanted to be sure that Cato’s Letters would be passed on to his son when he turned fifteen so that “the Spirit of Liberty” might “rest upon him.” 5 Gordon shared Bolingbroke’s belief in the relevance of the past to the present. These essays, first serialized in a London newspaper, had been brought together in four volumes after Trenchard’s death.
Teaming with an older and more widely read John Trenchard, Gordon co-authored Cato’s Letters between 1720–1723. Quincy also immersed himself in the writings of Bolingbroke’s contemporary, the Scotsman Thomas Gordon. Quincy began the commonplace book in June 1770 he made the Bolingbroke entries in 1771 or 1772, and did not finally put the commonplace book aside until he sailed for England in 1774. 4 Bolingbroke can be found about halfway through the commonplace book, in just three of more than three hundred entries drawn from over sixty sources. He quoted another that said much the same thing, a passage that Bolingbroke borrowed from Polybius. Quincy did not include this particular passage in his commonplace book.
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He who studies history as he would study philosophy will soon distinguish and collect them, and by doing so will soon form to himself a general system of ethics and politics on the surest foundations on the trial of those principles and rules in all ages, and on the confirmation of them by universal experience. There are certain general principles, and rules of life and conduct, which always must be true, because they are conformable to the invariable nature of things. History, he believed, should be studied for what it could teach about “private and public virtue.” In short, “I think, that history is philosophy teaching by examples.” To Bolingbroke, on a most basic level the human past and present were joined by a seamless web.
2 For those with a mere antiquarian interest in the past, readers who filled their heads with “learned lumber,” Boling-broke had had nothing but disdain. He compiled his commonplace book for a very practical purpose, as a man of political action, a participant in public affairs-like Bolingbroke himself. J osiah Quincy would not have disagreed with Bolingbroke, nor with Francis Bacon who had felt the same. A huge common-place book, wherein all the remarkable sayings and facts that we find in history are to be registered, may enable a man to talk or write like BODIN, but will never make him a better man, nor enable him to promote, like an useful citizen, the security, the peace, the welfare, or the grandeur of the community to which he belongs.