He was the first English Writer who openly maintained the Independence of the United States of America, and although his distinguished merits as a Naval Officer in 1776 presented the most flattering Prospects of Professional Advancement, yet he nobly refused to draw his Sword against the Rising Liberties of an oppressed and struggling People. In Grateful Commemoration of his inflexible integrity, exalted Patriotism, “profound Constitutional Knowledge,” and in sincere admiration of the unblemished Virtues of his Private Life, THIS STATUE was erected by Public Subscription near the spot where he closed his useful and meritorious career. There is nothing false or exaggerated in this epitaph. Fox, in the House of Commons, testified to Cartwright’s “profound constitutional knowledge.” Hazlitt, who never met Cartwright, classed him with the men of one idea (and lingered over the subject), but the charge is ill-founded. It is true that for nearly fifty years, in season and out of season, Cartwright, a pupil of Locke in politics, contended publicly for annual parliaments and manhood suffrage, claiming personality and not property as the ground for enfranchisement, and insisting that while the right of the rich and the poor to the vote was equal, the need of the latter was far greater. But this agitation was by no means the limit either of his ideas or his activities. Entering the navy at eighteen, John Cartwright, who came of an old Nottingham family, devised improvements in the gun service, and, made a lieutenant, was marked for high promotion. The revolt of the American colonies cut short his professional career. An innate love of liberty compelled the young naval officer to side with the colonists, and he writes in 1776 that it is a mistaken notion that the planting of colonies and the extending of empire are necessarily the same things. Self-governing colonies, he declares, bound to England only by “the ties of blood and mutual interests, by sincere love and friendship, which abhors dependence, and by every other cementing principle which hath power to take hold of the human heart,” are to be desired. Lord Howe put Cartwright’s principles to the test by inviting him to join the expedition against the Americans, and Cartwright, who was “passionately attached to the navy,” and had an immense admiration for Howe, could only answer that he was unable to take part in a war he thought unjust. With this refusal his naval services were ended, in spite of Howe’s quiet and dignified reply that “opinions in politics are to be treated like opinions in religion.” (No word of reproach came from Howe, no taunt of want of courage or lack of patriotism.)