d _a priori_ morality of which he was the somewhat muddled
defender was less favorable to a confidence in reason. He had a good
deal of John Brown's fear that luxury was the seed of English
degeneration; the proof of which he saw in the decline of the
population. His figures, in fact, were false; but they were unessential
to the general thesis he had to make.

Price, like Priestley a leading Nonconformist, was stirred to print by
the American Revolution; and if his views were not widely popular, his
_Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty_ (1776) attained its eighth
edition within a decade. This, with its supplement _Additional
Observations_ (1777), presents a perfectly coherent theory. Nor is their
ancestry concealed. They represent the tradition of Locke, modified by
the importations of Rousseau. Price owes much to Priestley and to Hume,
and he takes sentences from Montesquieu where they aid him. But he has
little or nothing of Priestley's utilitarianism and the whole argument
is upon the abstract basis of right. Liberty means self-government, and
self-government means the right of every man to be his own legislator.
Price, with strict logic, follows out this doctrine to its last
consequence. Taxes become "free gifts for public services"; laws are
"particular provisions or regulations established by Common Consent for
gaining protection and safety"; magistrates are "trustees or deputies
for carrying these regulations into execution." And almost in the words
of Rousseau, Price goes on to admit that liberty, "in its most perfect
degree, can be enjoyed only in small states where every independent
agent is capable of giving his suffrage in person and of being chosen
into public offices." He knows that large States are inevitable, though
he thinks that representation may be made so adequate as to minimize the
sacrifice of liberty involved.

But the limitation upon government is everywhere emphasized.
"Government," he says, "... is in the very nature of it a trust; and
all its powers a Delegation for particular ends." He rejects the theory
of parliamentary sovereignty as incompatible with self-government; if
the Parliament, for instance, prolonged its life, it would betray its
constituents and dissolve itself. "If omnipotence," he writes, "can with
any sense be ascribed to a legislature, it must be lodged where all
legislative authority originates; that is, in the People." Such a
system is alone compatible with the en