came the pioneer of philosophic anarchism. To Shelley at the end of
this marvellous thirty years of ardour, speculation, and despair, the
hope became winged. She had her place no longer in "the very world
which is the world of all of us." She had moved to

Kingless continents, sinless as Eden
Around mountains and islands inviolably
Prankt on the sapphire sea.

It requires no inordinate effort for us who live in an equable political
climate to realise the atmosphere of Dr. Price's Old Jewry sermon. The
lapse of a century indeed has made him a more intelligible figure than
he could have seemed to the generation which immediately followed him.
He was temperate in his rationalism and thrifty in his philanthropy. He
tended to Unitarianism in his theology, but was a sturdy defender of
Free Will. He had written a widely-read apology for the Colonial side in
the American Civil War. A stout individualist in his political theory,
inspired, as were nearly all the English progressive thinkers of his
day, by an extreme jealousy of State action, he yet guarded himself
carefully against anarchical conclusions, and followed Saint Paul in
teaching obedience to magistrates. He had written a treatise on ethics
which on some points anticipated Kant. But his most characteristic
pre-occupation was a study of finance in the interests of national
thrift and social benevolence. This cold moralist, who despised the
emotional aspects of human nature and found no place for the affections
in his scheme of the virtues, lapsed into passion when he attacked the
National Debt, and developed an arithmetical enthusiasm when he
explained his plan for providing through voluntary insurance for the old
age of the worthy poor. He was not quite the first of the philosophers
to dream of the abolition of war, and to plan an international tribunal
for the settlement of disputes between nations. In that he followed
Leibnitz, as he anticipated Kant.

It was such an essentially cold and calculating intellect as this which
in that age of ferment could launch the new doctrine of the infinite
perfectibility of mankind. Modern readers know the Rev. Dr. Price only
from the fulminations of Burke, in whose pages he figures now as an
incendiary and again as a fool. He was in point of fact the soul of
sobriety and the mirror of all the respectabilities in his serious
dissenting world. It is worth while to note that he was also, with his
friend Priestley, perha