Chapter 8 focuses on how the strand of legal argument traced in Chapter 7 was deployed by a number of pro-imperialist writers in England in reply to Price, Paine and the American colonists in 1776. The first to take up the claim that liberty is nothing other than absence of restraint were the lawyers John Lind and Richard Hey, and they were soon followed by a large number of other critics of Price, among whom the most prominent were Adam Ferguson, John Welsey and later William Paley. The chapter focuses in particular on three objections generally raised against Price’s account of liberty. The first was that his definition confuses the state of being unfree with that of merely lacking security for the liberty you possess. The second was that he connects liberty with an unviable concept of inalienable natural rights. The third was that, by defining liberty as absence of dependence, and then equating dependence with slavery, he commits himself to a morally indefensible definition of slavery. He forgets that slaves are not merely subject to the will of their masters, but that the chief horror of slavery is that they are also regarded as being their master’s property.