Politics & Power Quote by John Strachan

Strachan is arguing for empire as a matter of the soul, not the spreadsheet. The line reads like a calm administrative memo, but it’s really a power move: he’s relocating the glue of colonial loyalty from laws and markets (where it can be debated, reformed, or resisted) to “moral and religious feeling,” where dissent can be framed as depravity. If attachment to the “metropolis” is a spiritual posture, then separation isn’t a political choice; it’s backsliding.

The intent is practical. Strachan, an Anglican clergyman and a key voice in British North America, is writing in an era when colonial societies are porous and improvisational: settlers arrive with competing denominations, republican ideas circulate from the United States, and “commercial advantage” cuts both ways. Trade can tempt colonies to look south or outward; political arrangements can be renegotiated. Religion, he’s betting, can be made habitual, communal, and self-policing.

The subtext is also about class and authority. “More is not done to instill it into the minds of the people” casts the population as educable material and the clergy (and allied elites) as the rightful engineers of sentiment. It’s paternalism dressed as pastoral concern. Strachan isn’t simply recommending faith; he’s prescribing a loyalty technology: schools, sermons, and cultural formation that render Britishness not just preferable but righteous. In that framework, the Church becomes an instrument of statecraft, and empire becomes a moral identity rather than a contested arrangement.