or their
allegiance. Their utmost effort could secure only a sparing mitigation
of the Test Act. All of them were Whigs, and the doctrines of Locke
suited exactly their temper and their wants. There were amongst them
able men in every walk of life, and they were apt to publication. Joseph
Priestley, in particular, gave up with willingness to mankind what was
obviously meant for chemical science. A few years previously Brown of
the _Estimate_ had submitted a scheme for national education, in which
the essential principle was Church control. Priestley had answered him,
and was encouraged by friends to expand his argument into a general
treatise. His _Essay on the First Principles of Government_ appeared in
1768; and, if for nothing else, it would be noteworthy because it was
therein that the significance of the "greatest happiness principle"
first flashed across Bentham's mind. But the book shows more than this.
"I had placed," says Priestley with due modesty, "the foundation of some
of the most valuable interests of mankind on a broader and firmer basis
than Mr. Locke"; and the breadth and firmness are Rousseau's
contribution.

Certainly we herein meet new elements. On the very threshold of the book
we meet the dogma of the perfectibility of man. "Whatever," Priestley
rhapsodizes, "was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious
and paradisaical, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive." "The
instrument of this progress ... towards this glorious state" is
government; though a little later we are to find that the main business
of government is noninterference. Men are all equal, and their natural
rights are indefeasible. Government must be restrained in the interests
of liberty. No man can be governed without his consent; for government
is founded upon a contract by which civil liberty is surrendered in
exchange for a power to share in public decisions. It thus follows that
the people must be sovereign, and interference with their natural
rights will justify resistance. Every government, he says, is "in its
original principles, and antecedent to its present form an equal
republic"; wherefore, of course, it follows that we must restore to men
the equality they have lost. And, equally, of course, this would bestow
upon the Nonconformists their full citizenship; for Warburton's
_Alliance_, to attack which Priestley exhausts all the resources of his
ingenuity, has been one of the main instruments in their degr