single person, it can never be supposed that the resignation is obligatory on their posterity, because it is manifestly contrary to the good of the whole that it should be so." From this first principle he deduces all his political maxims. Kings, senators, and nobles, are merely the servants of the public; and, when they abuse their power, in the people lies the right of deposing and consequently of punishing them. He examines the expediency of hereditary sovereignty, of hereditary rank and privileges, of the duration of Parliament, and of the right of voting, with an evident tendency to democratic principles. Though he approved of a republic in the abstract, yet, considering the prejudices and habits of the people of Great Britain, he laid it down as a principle that their present form of government was best suited to them. He was an enemy to all violent reforms, and thought that the change ought to be brought about gradually and peaceably.
These principles excited no alarm and drew but little attention at the time of their publication in 1788, but the perturbation occasioned throughout Europe by the French Revolution was very conspicuous in England, and it was during the state of public irritability upon that subject that Dr. Priestley's teachings were made a source of public alarm. Opposed to a state church, liberal in religion, and advocating freedom of thought and liberty of discussion, he was represented as the enemy of the government and the foe of religion. The French recognized his eminent position as a champion of liberal thought, and he was honored by being made a citizen of France, and a member of the Assembly. This made him in a high degree obnoxious at home, and was laid hold of by his antagonists to convince the people that he was an enemy to his country, that he had abjured his rights as an Englishman, and had adopted the principles of the hereditary enemies of Great Britain. The clergy of the English Church, who began about this time to be alarmed for their establishment, of which Dr. Priestley was the open enemy, were particularly active; the press teemed with their denunciations of him, and the minds of their hearers were inflamed against him. This vicious state of feeling at length broke bounds and issued in violence. On the day of the anniversary of the French Revolution, in 1791, there was a riot in Birmingham, in which Dr. Priestley's meeting-house and dwelling-house were burned, his library and apparatus destroyed, and many manuscripts, the fruits of years of industry, were consumed in the conflagration. The houses of several of his friends shared the same fate, and his son was only saved from death by the care of a friend who concealed him for several days. Dr. Priestley was obliged to make his escape to London, and a seat was taken for him in the mail-coach under a borrowed name. Such was the ferment against him that it was believed he would not have been safe anywhere else, and his friends would not allow him for several weeks to walk through the streets. He was invited to Hackney to succeed the celebrated Unitarian clergyman Dr. Price. He ac-
