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 degradation.  “Unbounded liberty in matters of religion,” which means the abolition of the Establishment, promises to be “very favorable to the best interests of mankind.”

So far the book might well be called an edition of Rousseau for English Nonconformists; but there are divergences of import.  It can never be forgotten in the history of political ideas that the alliance of Church and State made Nonconformists suspicious of government interference.  Their original desire to be left unimpeded was soon exalted into a definite theory; and since political conditions had confined them so largely to trade none felt as they did the hampering influence of State-restrictions.  The result has been a great difficulty in making liberal doctrines in England realize, until after 1870, the organic nature of the State.  It remains for them almost entirely a police institution which, once it aims at the realization of right, usurps a function far better performed by individuals.  There is no sense of the community; all that exists is a sum