“Government must depend for its Efficiency either on Force or Opinion.” From ‘The Colonist’s Advocate’, VII. (Feb 1, 1770)   We have become accustomed, today, to seeing our own societies as the pinnacle of human achievement because we have reached a settlement which once appeared impossible: a society governed not by force but by opinion. The promise of a liberal democracy is that the weight of the majority ought to be greater than that of the strong and that persuasion should reign where coercion once governed human affairs. When Benjamin Franklin observed, in 1770, that all governments must rest either upon force or opinion for their ‘efficiency’ (by which he, a man of the eighteenth century, meant what we now term efficacy), he was advancing what was not then a commonplace but instead a remarkable rejection of the existing order of political life. That force ruled in the world of politics was accepted by almost all of Franklin’s contemporaries.…