36 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY I 



the astounding difference in this respect between 

 the nineteenth century and the eighteenth. 



If we ask what is the deeper meaning of all 

 these vast changes, I think there can be but one 

 reply. They mean that reason has asserted and 

 exercised her primacy over all provinces of human 

 activity : that ecclesiastical authority has been 

 relegated to its proper place ; that the good of the 

 governed has been finally recognised as the end of 

 government, and the complete responsibility of 

 governors to the people as its means ; and that 

 the dependence of natural phenomena in general 

 on the laws of action of what we call matter has 

 become an axiom. 



But it was to bring these things about, and to 

 enforce the recognition of these truths, that 

 Joseph Priestley laboured. If the nineteenth 

 century is other and better than the eighteenth, 

 it is, in great measure, to him, and to such men as 

 he, that we owe the change. If the twentieth 

 century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will 

 be because there are among us men who walk in 

 Priestley's footsteps. 



Such men are not those whom their own 

 generation delights to honour ; such men, in fact, 

 rarely trouble themselves about honour, but ask, 

 in another spirit than Falstaff 's, " What is honour ? 

 Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday." 

 But whether Priestley's lot be theirs, and a future 

 generation, in justice and in gratitude, set up 



