is a hundred and five years, and that, in the middle of the last
century, we had but just safely freed ourselves from our Bourbons and
all that they represented. The corruption of our state was as bad as
that of the Second Empire. Bribery was the instrument of government,
and peculation its reward. Four-fifths of the seats in the House of
Commons were more or less openly dealt with as property. A minister had
to consider the state of the vote market, and the sovereign secured a
sufficiency of "king's friends" by payments allotted with retail,
rather than royal, sagacity.

Barefaced and brutal immorality and intemperance pervaded the land,
from the highest to the lowest classes of society. The Established
Church was torpid, as far as it was not a scandal; but those who
dissented from it came within the meshes of the Act of Uniformity, the
Test Act, and the Corporation Act. By law, such a man as Priestley,
being a Unitarian, could neither teach nor preach, and was liable to
ruinous fines and long imprisonment. [17] In those days the guns that
were pointed by the Church against the Dissenters were shotted. The law
was a cesspool of iniquity and cruelty. Adam Smith was a new prophet
whom few regarded, and commerce was hampered by idiotic impediments,
and ruined by still more absurd help, on the part of government.

Birmingham, though already the centre of a considerable industry, was a
mere village as compared with its present extent. People who travelled
went about armed, by reason of the abundance of highwaymen and the
paucity and inefficiency of the police. Stage coaches had not reached
Birmingham, and it took three days to get to London. Even canals were a
recent and much opposed invention.

Newton had laid the foundation of a mechanical conception of the