JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. 129 



greatness of Birmingham, tried to set fire to the doctor's 

 house with sparks from his own electrical machine ; there- 

 by giving the man they called an incendiary and raiser 

 of sedition against Church and King, an appropriately 

 experimental illustration of the nature of arson and riot. 



If I have succeeded in putting before you the main 

 features of Priestley's work, its value will become ap- 

 parent, when we compare the condition of the English 

 nation, as he knew it, with its present state. 



The fact that France has been for eighty-five years 

 trying, without much success, to right herself after the 

 great storm of the Ee volution, 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 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 Com- 

 mons 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 intemperance 



