known better) a state of nature, in which every individual is possessed of natural liberty, part of which he resigns into a common stock, out of which arises that power of directing the conduct of others, which we call government. This scheme, even at first sight, must be false: because, out of liberty, nothing can arise but liberty: whereas government is a power of restraining, and power must arise out of power not out of liberty, for this is the antagonist of power; and accordingly, all those busy gentlemen who are now striving against government, call themselves the friends of liberty. The principle which dissolves government can never be the principle out of which it arises; and the case is so plain that a child may see it.

This absurdity, however, runs through all our author's politics; in which, as occasion requires, he substitutes power and liberty for one another. Thus doth he begin his fundamental definition.-Political liberty consists in the

power which the members of the state reserve to themselves of arriving at public offices, &c. (Essay on the first Pr. of Gov. p. 9.) Here liberty is confounded with the power of governing; that is, of restraining liberty and we reckon a writer who is loose in a definition,

to

to be either cloudy in his understanding, or fraudulent in his intention; a swindler in reasoning, who takes up what he has not fairly purchased.

When the Doctor's principles are brought together and compared, the perplexity is obvious. He distinguishes (for clearness, as he observes) liberty into political and civil; making the latter a power over our own actions, and the former a power over the actions of others; that is, a power of ruling, and a power of not being ruled; which in effect leave all power in equilibrio; and so amount to nothing. His two sorts of liberty are evidently two sorts of power, which annihilate each other: and all this is for clearness.

He farther asserts (p. 12.) that "as every man retains, and can never be deprived of his natural right of relieving himself from all oppression; that is, from every thing that has been imposed upon him without his own consent; this must be the only true and proper foundation of all the governments subsisting in the world." Which means in plainer English, that the only proper foundation of government is the power of overturning government; which he calls relieving ourselves from oppression; and a power

VOL. XII.

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this

this is which may be turned against the ten commandments; for these having been imposed upon us without our own consent, (it being certain that we had no hand in the making of them) are consequently by Dr. Priestley's rule, an oppression.

It is another of his fundamental maxims, that kings, senators and nobles are to all intents the servants of the public, and accountable to the people: (p. 23.) which principle, when transferred from the body civil to the body natural, asserts the headship of the feet and toes; which is very good sense when our meaning is to turn the world upside down. If it be our intention to overturn establishments, we must advance such principles as will promote the great work of decomposition. But decomposition, as we find by experience, is an experiment attended with some loss. When chymists undertake to analyze, a subtile principle evaporates, which can never be restored; and this extends by analogy to other cases. It is easy to take a man to pieces; but life escapes in the experiment, and the man can never be put together any more. Every legal government is a composition, of which God, by his laws and his providence, makes himself a part;

the animating part, which gives energy and effect to the whole. When this is lost, on a dissolution of the state, and of laws human and divine, it is not in the power of man to restore it. There may be a thing framed which will call itself a government; but it will have no authority nor stability, because it is built upon a loose bottom. Cruelty and revenge will take the place of penal, and robbery and sacrilege of distributive justice; and a thousand other evils will happen, which all good men will deprecate, because none but evil men can be gainers by them; and they only in appearance; for the whole is a deception and a phantom.

Our author's political casuistry is as curious as his principles. He has one measure for us and another for himself. In his letters to Mr. Burke he lays it down, that we have no business to find fault with the French for what they have thought proper to do in their own affairs, (p. 3.) But if it be a good rule to let our neighbours alone in managing for themselves, how comes it that the Doctor is so busy and so severe a critic upon the church of England, a society to which he does not belong? and why were he and his friends so zealous to celebrate the French revolution? Why is he, who is a

stranger, at liberty to applaud and give his sanction to their proceedings: if we, who are also strangers, are not at liberty to censure them? It will never be a matter of indifference whether vice or virtue prevail in the world: the cause of the French, in this view of it, is the cause of mankind. The Doctor and his friends obliged us to consider whether the French had done right or wrong, because they persuaded us to do the same thing at home: and their motions toward it alarmed the people at Birmingham, and occasioned all those disturbances, the causes of which are as well understood by the Doctor himself as by any person in this kingdom.

The French nation were at liberty, he says, to better their condition without consulting us. But here again, the Doctor's casuistry is as loose as before for no man can be justified in bettering his condition, unless he does it by lawful means. If a man betters his condition out of the property and lives of his fellow-subjects, he is a felon and a murderer; and, as Dr. Franklin rightly observed, it makes no difference whether this be done by a single person or by a larger gang, or by one half of a nation against the

other half.

There