Declaration of Independence - 1776
Articles of Confederation - 1777
The Constitution for the United States, Its Sources and Its Application
The Real Thirteenth Amendment: Titles of Nobility and Honour
The Latest Findings of the TONA Research Committee

The Original Thirteenth Amendment:
Titles of Nobility and Honour,
An Essay

Chapter 4
Panic, War and Opium, The British Way

"In our comprehensive reviewing of published, academically accepted history", wrote Buckminster Fuller, "we continually explore for the invisible power structure behind the visible kinds, prime ministers, czars, emperors, presidents, and other officials ... as well as for the underlying, hidden causes of individual wars and their long, drawn-out campaigns not disclosed by the widely published and popularly accepted causes of those wars."

Following the establishment of a British settlement at Singapore in 1819, the world's greatest seafaring power endured numerous social, military and financial upsets en route to complete domination of both India and China, over the next forty years. A conspiracy to murder various members of the British cabinet -- known by the nickname "Cato Street" -- is broken up in 1820, and its leaders are executed.

In 1822 British Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh commits suicide, at the mature age of 52: in southern Europe, the Greek people adopt a "republican constitution" and proclaim their independence from Islamic Turkey. Years of diplomatic wrangling, bitter fighting, massacres and reprisals ensue.

Asia continued to be the source of Britain's major revenues. British forces conquer Rangoon, in Burma, in 1824, while at home the Trade Union movement flourishes after the repeal of The Combinations Law of 1800. And all the while, opium is moving from India into China via British and French vessels.

Non-communist Chinese historical sources report that the British East India Company moved 154,000 pounds of opium into China, in 1773. Despite the fact that opium smoking had been prohibited by the Emperor Yung Cheng in 1729, the traffic continued to grow throughout the century. In 1796 the Edict of Peking banned the importation of opium completely: nevertheless, by 1838 smuggling had increased to about eight million pounds and addiction had become a major social problem. On behalf of the Imperial family, Commissioner Lin Tse-Hsu wrote to the new Queen, Victoria:

"The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians .... By what right do they in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Let me ask, where is their conscience? I have heard that the smoking of Opium is very strictly forbidden by your country .... Why do you let it be passed on to the harm of other countries? Suppose there were people from another country who carried Opium for sale to England and seduced your people into buying and smoking it; certainly your honorable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused. Naturally you would not wish to give unto others what you yourself do not want ...."

During the 1770s, the Chinese were trading silk and spices for European gold, nearly bankrupting the East India Company and the Rothschilds banking establishment. The British conquest of India in 1772 was to ensure a monopoly of the opium production India. The cargo manifests of the three ships involved in the Boston Tea Party in Boston Harbor in Deember, 1773 included opium. By the 1820s the opium trade was taking gold and silver out of China, and by 1839 it was serious enough to provoke a full-scale war. In that same period, the second Bank of the United States was put under intense scrutiny.

Federalist control of the U.S. government disappears in 1828, as Congress passes new laws curtailing imports, the so-called "Tariff of Abominations;" and Andrew Jackson defeats John Quincy Adams in the Presidential election. This is also the year when Joseph Story's "Public and General Statutes ..." is published, the first major, privately printed compilation of U.S. law which completely omits the 13th Article of Amendment, and omits the Resolution of the Eleventh Congress in issuing that section to the States for ratification in 1810.

President Andrew Jackson attacks the power and privileges accorded to the second Bank of the United States, controlled by Nicholas Biddle, in 1829. Thus begins an eight year struggle over finance which culminates in the Panic of 1837. The crisis is characterized by inflated land values, speculation in paper and unscrupulous banking practices.

Again, turning to Buckminster Fuller:

"The British Empire was commanded from the British Isles by great business venturers -- the world men who ruled the world's oceans. The British Isles were ... conveniently positioned to rule the whole waterfront of all the European customers of the venturer's Oriental booty."

For a variety of reasons too complex to include in this essay, the British government and the East India Company were very busy with affairs in India and China during the years 1845-1857, when the United States concluded its second largest phase of expansion, bringing the Territory of Florida into the union as well as the Republic of Texas -- 1845. That was the year that the Anglo-Sikh war began, which turned out badly for the Sikhs and ended in 1846.

By the beginning of the second Sikh war, in 1848, the United States had added Iowa and Wisconsin to the union, and increased their territory governed by the addition of New Mexico, Utah, California, Nevada, Arizona and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo relieved Mexico of the burden of governance and provided the defeated neighbor "a large indemnity." Those areas mentioned now comprise seven states and included 75 votes in the electoral college: but more importantly, everything that is authentic about the American west in philsophy, culture, legend and true fortunes made, comes out of that territory (and Texas).

The British military power controlling India also continued to grow during this era, as the Sikhs were defeated again and Punjab was annexed by treaty. Isolated on their islands, with their great fleet and the commercial power of the East India merchants and the related banking families behind them, the government in London was not rocked by the "system-wide" revolt of 1848, in central Europe. Three different revolutions shatter the aristocracy of Vienna, the Hungarian Diet proclaims its independence in 1849 and then capitulates, while the rest of Europe is aflame.

By 1850 the population of the United States exceeds that of Great Britain by more than three million people. While the old regimes of Europe groan under the weight of their ancient traditions, noblesse oblige, military orders and honors, the United States has land and more of it. The west has moved past Illinois to Minnesota.

In the land where Lincoln was making his name, their rough-hewn pioneer constitution was being replaced by new charters -- which are more skillfully written, more lawerly in their prose -- but less akin to the libertarian style of 1818. In the present day and time, the centralizing force of the federal government is being diminished by the power of technology: The Internet is driving political power back to the States and to communities within those sovereign political units! Political-business leaders like Steve Forbes more closely resemble the second wave of federalists, than those who foisted the so-called Fourteenth Amendment on this country after the Civil War. However, the influence of thoughtful leaders like Noah Webster, and his brother, was wide-reaching in the 1820s and '30s:

"The national government possesses those powers which it can be shown the people have conferred upon it," avows Daniel Webster, speaking on January 26th, 1830, in the Senate, "and no more. All the rest belongs to the State governments, or to the people themselves."

The decision by Illinois to adopt Prohibition of Alcohol in 1851 marked the triumph of the federalist plans elucidated by those writers and philosophers active in the years 1806-1822: those men, like the two Websters and William S. Cardell, were simply carrying on the great political plan adopted by Alexander Hamilton during the Adams-Jefferson election. And they were doing so in the States.

Borrowing from Albert Jay Nock, again:

"The campaign of 1800 had many diverting features. The moral and religious forces of the country had already largely enlisted themselves in the service of partisan politics, with an immense preponderance on the Federalist side, since, to paraphrase Jay's dictum, those who owned the churches governed the church. 'The rich and well-born' in New York and New England gave special attention to this mode of propaganda, getting such good results out of it that Hamilton presently proposed to organize it formally on a permanent basis by establishing a Christian Constitutional Society. This was to be, in principle, a cheap popular edition of the Order of the Cincinnati, to offset the 'Jacobin clubs' and the democratic societies. Hamilton's prospectus for this interesting project set forth its objects as, first, 'the support of the Christian religion,' and, second, 'the support of the Constitution of the United States.' Rather oddly, not a word more is said about the first object, but a great deal about the second.

"'The Society was to attend to the cultivation of popular favor by fair and justifiable expedients,' such as, first and foremost, 'the diffusion of information.' For this purpose not only the newspapers but pamphlets must be largely employed .... It is essential to be able to disseminate gratis useful publications. "

"Next, 'the use of all lawful means in concert to promote the election of fit men.' Finally - most interesting anticipation of all - 'the promoting of institutions of a charitable and useful nature [under] the management of Federalists. The populous cities ought particularly to be attended to; perhaps it would be well to institute in such places - 1st, societies for the relief of emigrants; 2nd, academies, each with one professor, for instructing the different classes of mechanics in the principles of mechanics and the element of chemistry.'"

This last goal of Hamilton's plan was explicitly dealt with at some length -- in Cardell's Circular Essay of 1821 -- by the men who were Alexander Hamilton's inheritors. Perhaps it is coincidence, but the first "normal" schools for teaching teachers and other trades were founded in 1825 (or at about the time most English claims were being resolved).

Having lost direct control of some of the wealth-producing land in the new Republic, the money factors of Great Britain and the Netherlands continued to enjoy superlative profits from their trade with India. The social tumult affecting central Europe was of greater concern to the French, with their concern for the power and influence of the Papacy in Rome, than it ever could be for the British. The various powerful interests in the German states were busy with the revolts in their own towns and cities, and with the perceived threat of cultural unity among the Slavic peoples of central Europe. German nationalism, led by the Prussian military and aristocracy, begins its rise.

But Britain keeps its focus on the Far East. In 1856 the Anglo-Chinese, or Second Opium war began. In 1857 the British wrecked the Chinese navy and, side-by-side with France, began to enforce significant concessions on trade, including possession of Canton. Defeated, the Chinese still refused to concede to the importation of opium, even though they had previously ceded Hong Kong. The result was another humiliating defeat in 1860, the destruction of the Summer Palace and the loss of Kowloon and of Stonecutters Island. The opium traffic and opium addiction were continued -- in China -- until 1943, and many other European powers sought trade advantages from "the sick man of Asia."

The Treaty of Tientsin ends the Anglo-Chinese war in 1858. Soon thereafter, all the powers of the East India Company are transferred to the British Crown, and there is a general period of peace in India (after the bloodiest fighting ever known to the British Army, during the Indian Mutiny and the seige of Delhi). In the U.S., these are the years of "Bloody Kansas," as the Jayhawks and the Redlegs fight over slavery.

Irish immigration into the States nears the one million mark, and "The Catholic Times" is first published. Queen Victoria establishes "the Order of the Star of India," in 1861 while the U.S. moves to adopt British-style passports.

French military adventurism extends into the New World in 1863, while the United States is embroiled in Civil War. Mexico City is captured and the Archduke Maximilian of Austria is then proclaimed Emperor. The State of Kansas, admitted to the Union in 1861, publishes its organic laws -- including the Title of Nobility Amendment as part of the U.S. Constitution -- in separate editions of 1861 and 1862, as does the Territory of Colorado. Yet the federal government under Abraham Lincoln continues to prosecute its foreign policy without reference to this important, Constitutional protection. Thus continues the effort to "disappear" this valid and properly ratified Amendment.

During the Civil War, smugglers and Confederate blockade runners, deserters and international criminals swell the population of Matamoros, in Mexico. By 1864 it has the finest Opera House in the western world, while cross-border shipments of gold and weapons make instantaneous fortunes in both Mexico and Texas. The last battle of the Civil War occurs near the border, at Palmitto Ranch, and the federal troops are defeated. The collapse of the Confederacy sends large numbers of Confederate soldiers into northern Mexico and Arizona, resulting in many years of lawlessness and conflict with the Apache: pro-Union forces in Colorado maintain complete control, there, during the war. The years from 1866 to 1876 are filled with rapid growth and social turmoil for Colorado, which again publishes its organic laws in 1868, showing the Title of Nobility Amendment as being valid, with the anti-slavery Amendment drafted by Lincoln and the Congress in 1865, as Article 14.

So, from the mid-1820s until after the conclusion of the Civil War, the "peculiar institution" of slavery consumed the political energies of the Congress -- if not of the society at large -- while providing nearly free labor for the cultivation of cotton, rice, indigo and the cutting of timber. These and other agricultural commodities exported by the southern States were of maximum value to the British in the 1850s, as they prosecuted their new wars against China. Yet it is important to note that the movement to ignore, suppress and "disappear" the Title of Nobility Amendment did not begin until three years after the death of Thomas Jefferson, on July 4th, 1825.

As Buckminster Fuller's analysis shows, in all those years and decades of British supremacy the principal benefactors of international trade -- based on the collateral wealth of agricultural land holdings -- were the private bankers seated behind the thrones of Europe, and the royal families which had absorbed the trading companies and licensed the privately chartered shipping that served those firms. British military forces were deployed to southern and eastern Africa, following the Anglo-Chinese wars and expeditions (and just in time to secure the newly discovered diamond fields and gold mines). And 1868 becomes the watershed year in all of this painful conflict and growth, as Ulysses S. Grant is elected President, while William E. Gladstone moves up to become Prime Minister of Great Britain at the same time.

The American Civil War proved to be an incredible engine of technological change and development. The advances in weapons technology circulated rapidly amongst all of the European powers, and the world of science entered its longest phase of expansion with new discoveries in metallurgy, circa 1863. The founding of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1865, is just one indicator of the surge in scientific knowledge, and its organization by the world's colleges and academies.

The last few editions of the organic laws, issued by States or Territories, occur at this time -- the Dakota Territory's 1867, and the previously mentioned editions of Colorado and Wyoming mark the final appearances of the original Thirteenth Amendment as a valid part of the U.S. Constitution -- and after Colorado is admitted to the Union in 1876, it is never heard from again.

End of Chapter 4

---

Continue

Introduction - "The Original 13th Amendment Titles of Nobility and Honour"
Chapter 1 -The Prohibition of Titles of Nobility and Honour
Chapter 2 - Ratification 1810-1820
Chapter 3 - Philadelphia Lawyers and a Mock Nobility
Chapter 4 - Panic, War & Opium, The British Way
Chapter 5 - One Hundred Years of Pain
Chapter 6 - The Secret Armies
Table of Ratification and Publications
The 13th Anti-Slavery Amendment and The Flawed 14th Amendment
Our Enemy, The State by Albert Jay Nock, The Classic Critique Distinguishing "Government" from "State"