122 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. [LECT. 



minister 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 Established Church was torpid, 

 so far as it was not a scandal; but those who dis- 

 sented from it came within the meshes of the Act of 

 Uniformity, 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 ruin- 

 ous 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 con- 

 siderable industry, was a mere village as compared 

 with its present extent. People who travelled 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 



1 In 1732 Doddridge was cited for teaching without the Bishop's 

 leave, at Northampton. 



