In the person of a Chinese merchant explaining to a colleague what made England so free, Oliver Goldsmith argued that it was not a lack of laws but a culture in which ordinary citizens could to some extent dispense themselves from laws they found irksome. He traced this liberty to Britain’s unique constitutional blend of democracy and monarchy.

Of course (Goldsmith added) if the relaxed attitude to regulation began to cause harm to wider society, then magistrates still retained the power to exact punishment. This was, however, not an option in Continental countries, where their forms of government piled on more and more regulations and rigorously enforced them — a state of affairs he could not see lasting long.

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