Yet such defects must not blind us to the general rightness of their insight.  They were protesting against a system strongly upheld on grounds which now appear to have been simply indefensible.  The business of government had been made the private possession of a privileged class; and eagerness for desirable change was, in the mass, absent from the minds of most men engaged in its direction.  The loss of America, the heartless treatment of Ireland, the unconstitutional practices in the Wilkes affair, the heightening of corruption undertaken by Henry Fox and North at the direct instance of the king, had blinded the eyes of most to the fact that principle is a vital part of policy.  The revolutionists recalled men to the need of explaining, no less than carrying on, the government of the Crown.  They represented the new sense of power felt by elements of which the importance had been forgotten in the sordid intrigues of the previous half-century.  Their emphasis upon government as in its nature a public trust was at least accompanied by a useful reminder that, after all, ultimate power must rest upon the side of the governed.  For twenty years Whigs and Tories alike carried on political controversy as though no public opinion existed outside the small circle of the aristocracy.  The mob which made Wilkes its idol was, in a blind and unconscious way, enforcing the lesson that Price and Priestley had in mind.  For the moment, they were unsuccessful.  Cartwright, with his Constitutional Societies, might capture the support of an eccentric peer like the Duke of Richmond; but the vast majority remained, if irritated, unconvinced.  It needed the realization that the new doctrines were part of a vaster synthesis which swept within its purview the fortunes of Europe and America before they would give serious heed; and even then they met antagonism with nothing save oppression and hate.  Yet the doctrines remained; for thought, after all, is killed by reasoned answer alone.  And when the first gusts of war and revolution had passed, the cause for which they stood was found to have permeated all classes save that which had all to lose by learning.

We must not, however, commit the error of thinking of Price and Priestley as representing more than an important segment of opinion.  The opposition to their theories was not less articulate than their own defence of them.  Some, like Burke, desired a purification of the existing system; others, like Dr. Johnson, had no sort of sympathy with new-fangled ideas.  One thinker, at least, deserves some mention less for the inherent value of what he had to say, than for the nature of the opinions he expounded.  Josiah Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, has a reputation alike in political and economic enquiry.  He represents the sturdy nationalism of Arbuthnot’s John Bull, the unreasoned prejudice against all foreigners, the hatred of all metaphysics as inconsistent with common sense, the desire to let things be on the ground