A Full and Free Inquiry Into the Merits of the Peace; With Some Strictures On the Spirit of Party
- Anonymous Pamphleteer 1765 (author)
- Jack P. Greene (collection editor)
This essay is a political pamphlet engaging with the legacy and controversy surrounding the Treaty of Paris (1763), which brought the Seven Years' War to a close. The author undertakes a reasoned assessment of the peace settlement’s terms — weighing Britain’s diplomatic gains and concessions against the backdrop of its military triumphs — and argues for an honest, dispassionate evaluation of whether the treaty served Britain’s true national interest.
The pamphlet’s second concern, signaled by the “strictures on the spirit of party,” is a critique of how factional rivalry between Whigs and Tories, and between supporters of William Pitt and Lord Bute, had corrupted public debate and made sober political judgment nearly impossible. Writing anonymously, as was common for politically sensitive commentary of the period, the author positions himself above partisan loyalty and calls for a return to principled deliberation. The work reflects the heated political atmosphere of the mid-1760s, when disputes over the peace terms, colonial taxation, and ministerial authority were fracturing British political life.
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The text of these 18th century pamphlets has been converted by machine from scanned PDFs of the original microfilm copies. While the text has been machine-proofed, transcription errors may still remain. For example, the 18th-century long S, ſ , may be rendered as “f,” some words may be incorrectly transcribed, and there may be repeated words or phrases.