I JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 31 



The fact that France has been for eighty-five 

 years trying, without much success, to right 

 herself after the great storm of the Revolution, 

 is not unfrequently cited among us as an indi- 

 cation of some inherent incapacity for self- 

 government among the French people. I think, 

 however, that Englishmen who argue thus, forget 

 that, from the meeting 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 safely 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 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 intem- 

 perance pervaded the land, from the highest to 

 the lowest classes of society. The Established 

 Church was torpid, as far as it was not a scandal ; 

 but those who dissented 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 ruinous fines and 



