Politics & Power Quote by Charles Inglis

“Government is the only Means by which human Happiness can be attained” is the kind of sentence that tries to end an argument by sounding like moral geometry. Inglis, a clergyman and prominent Loyalist voice on the eve of the American Revolution, isn’t casually praising civic life; he’s laying down a theological-political axiom meant to discipline dissent. The capital letters do real work here. “Wisdom,” “Injunction,” “Duty,” “Government,” “Happiness” read less like concepts than like pillars of a catechism. If you accept the premise, resistance stops being political and becomes a failure of character.

The specific intent is persuasion with a pastoral edge: to frame obedience as the rational route to the good life. In a moment when colonists were arguing that liberty and happiness might require breaking with authority, Inglis flips the equation. Happiness, in his telling, isn’t a natural right you defend against government; it’s a product government manufactures. That turns grievances into ingratitude and protest into self-harm.

Subtext: order is not just preferable, it’s salvific. As a clergyman, Inglis is borrowing the language of the pulpit to shore up the legitimacy of imperial governance. The word “only” is the tell. It erases alternative sources of flourishing - community, conscience, local self-rule - and makes the state the exclusive mediator between ordinary people and the good. In Loyalist hands, “happiness” becomes a conservative weapon: a promise of comfort contingent on compliance, delivered as moral instruction rather than debate.