JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. 105 



much success, to right herself after the great storm of the Revolution, 

 is not unfrequently cited among us as an indication of some inherent 

 incapacity for self-government among the French people. I think, 

 however, that Englishmen who argue thus forget that, from the meet- 

 ing of the Long Parliament in 1640, to the last Stuart rebellion in 

 1745, is a hundred and five years, and that, in the middle of the last 

 century, we had but just freed ourselves from our Bourbons and all 

 that they represented. The corruption of our state was as bad as that 

 of the Second Empire. Bribery was the instrument of government, 

 and peculation its reward. Four-fifths of the seats in the House of 

 Commons were more or less openly dealt with as property. A minis- 

 ter had to consider the state of the vote market, and the sovereign 

 secured a sufficiency of " king's friends " by payments allotted with 

 retail, rather than royal, sagacity. 



Barefaced and brutal immorality and intemperance pervaded the 

 land, from the highest to the lowest classes of society. The Estab- 

 lished Church was torpid, so far as it was not a scandal ; but those 

 who dissented from it came within the meshes of the Act of Uniform- 

 ity, the Test Act, and the Corporation Act. By law, such a man as 

 Priestley, being a Unitarian, could neither teach nor preach, and was 

 liable to ruinous fines and long imprisonment. 1 In those days, the 

 guns that were pointed by the Church against the Dissenters were 

 shotted. The law was a cesspool of iniquity and cruelty. Adam 

 Smith was a new prophet whom few regarded, and commerce was 

 hampered by idiotic impediments, and ruined by still more absurd 

 help, on the part of government. 



Birmingham, though already the centre of a considerable industry, 

 was a mere village as compared with its present extent. People who 

 traveled went about armed, by reason of the abundance of highway-; 

 men and the paucity and inefficiency of the police. Stage-coaches had 

 not reached Birmingham, and it took three days to get to London. 

 Even canals were a recent and much-opposed invention. 



Newton had laid the foundation of a mechanical conception of the 

 physical universe ; Hartley, putting a modern face upon ancient mate- 

 rialism, had extended that mechanical conception to psychology; Lin- 

 naeus and Haller were beginning to introduce method and order into 

 the chaotic accumulation of biological facts. But those parts of phys- 

 ical science which deal with heat, electricity, and magnetism, and, 

 above all, chemistry, in the modern sense, can hardly be said to have 

 had an existence. No one knew that two of the old elemental bodies, 

 air and water, are compounds, and that a third, fire, is not a substance 

 but a motion. The great industries that have grown out of the appli- 

 cations of modern scientific discoveries had no existence, and the man, 

 who should have foretold their coming into being in the days of his 

 son, would have been regarded: as a mad. enthusiast. 



1 In 1732 Doddridge was cited for teaching without the bishop's leave, at Northampton. . 



