Politics & Power Quote by Albert Bushnell Hart

Hart is quietly twisting the knife: the American colonies, supposedly England's political dependents, practiced a more honest version of English constitutionalism than England itself. The line hinges on that jabby contrast between "actually had" and "only seemed to have". It is less a civics lesson than a historian's indictment of metropolitan mythology. Britain congratulated itself on balanced government - Crown, Lords, Commons - yet Hart implies the separation was theatrical, a set of institutions that looked distinct while power and patronage blurred the boundaries. The colonies, by necessity and distance, built something closer to the textbook: executive, legislative, judicial functions that could check one another in recognizable ways.

The intent is double. On the surface, Hart is explaining why colonial political participation mattered: it trained ordinary voters, officeholders, and pamphleteers in self-rule. Underneath, he's reframing the Revolution as the culmination of lived political competence rather than sudden ideological fever. If the colonists already operated within "three departments", then independence reads less like a leap into the unknown and more like a claim to political adulthood.

Context matters. Writing as a Progressive Era historian, Hart is preoccupied with institutions and their development, and he tends to locate democratic legitimacy in structures, not just slogans. There's also a subtle apology for American exceptionalism here, but it's an institutional one: not that Americans were morally superior, but that their conditions produced clearer lines of accountability. The subtext: when a system "seems" free, it can still function like a managed hierarchy; when people "participate", the machinery becomes real.