Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/745

Rh P R I P 721 mining, the inhabitants occupy themselves in making glass beads, soap, candles, beer, and liqueurs. The most interesting buildings are the old deanery and church, and the archiepiscopal palace, now converted into a mining academy. At the top of the Heiliger Berg, a hill rising above the town, is a church with a wonder-working image of the Virgin, which attracts numerous pilgrims. The population of Pribram in 1880 was 11,171, or, including the adjacent Birkenberg, where the largest mines are situated, 14,881. PRICE, RICHARD (1723-1791), philosopher, son of a Dissenting minister, was born on 23d February 1723, at Tynton, in the parish of Llangeinor, Glamorganshire. His education was conducted partly by private tutors, partly at private schools. His father was a bigoted Calvinist and seems to have been a person of morose temper, facts which may account, on the principle of reaction, for the liberal opinions and the benevolent disposition of the son. Young Price appears at an early age to have studied the works of Clarke and Butler, and to have conceived a special admiration for the theological and philosophical works of the latter writer. In his eighteenth year he removed to a Dissenting academy in London, and, having completed his education, became chaplain and companion to a Mr Streatfield at Stoke -Newington. While still occupying this position he officiated in various Dissenting congrega tions, such as those in the Old Jewry, Edmonton, and Newington Green. By the death of Mr Streatfield and of an uncle in 1756 his circumstances were considerably improved, and in the following year, the year in which he first published his best -known work, a Revieio of the Principal Questions in Morals, he married a Miss Sarah Blundell, originally of Belgrave in Leicestershire. Price now resided at Newington Green, where his time appears to have been mainly occupied in the performance of his ministerial duties, though he made occasional excursions into the regions of mathematics and philosophy. In 1767 he published a volume of sermons, including One on the future state, which attracted the attention and gained him the acquaintance of Lord Shelburne, an event which had much influence in raising his reputation and deter mining the character of his subsequent pursuits. Soon after this date he added to his duties at Newington Green those of morning preacher to a congregation at Hackney, where his audience appears to have been more numerous and appreciative than any which he had heretofore suc ceeded in keeping together. But it was not so much in the capacity of a religious teacher as a writer on financial and political questions that Price was destined to become known to his countrymen at large. In 1769 he wrote some observations addressed in a letter to Dr Franklin on the expectation of lives, the in crease of mankind, and the population of London, which were published in the Philosophical Transactions of that year; and, again, in May 1770, he communicated to the Royal Society some observations on the proper method of calculating the values of contingent reversions. The pub lication of these papers is said to have exercised a most beneficial influence in drawing attention to the inadequate calculations on which many insurance and benefit societies had recently been formed. In the year 1769 Price re ceived the degree of D.D. from the university of Glasgow. In 1771 he published his Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt, of which subsequent editions appeared in 1772 and 1774. This pamphlet excited con siderable controversy at the time of its publication, and is supposed to have influenced Pitt in re-establishing the sinking fund .for the extinction of the national debt, which had been created by Walpole in 1716 and abolished in 1733. That Price s main object, the extinction of the national debt, was a laudable and desirable one would now probably be universally acknowledged. The particu lar means, however, which he proposed for the purpose of effecting this object are described by Lord Overstone J as &quot;a sort of hocus-pocus machinery,&quot; supposed to work &quot;with out loss to any one,&quot; and consequently purely delusive. As Lord Overstone says, all the sinking funds that have been set on foot have been supported either by loans or by the produce of taxes, and have never paid off a single shilling of debt by their own agency. In 1829 Pitt s sinking fund was abolished by Act of parliament. A subject of a much more popular kind was next to employ Dr Price s pen. Being an ardent lover of civil and religious liberty, he had from the first been strongly opposed to the war with the American colonies, and in 1776 he published a pamphlet entitled Observations on Civil Liberty and the Justice and Policy of the War with America. Several thousand copies of this work were sold within a few days ; a cheap edition was soon issued ; the pamphlet was extolled by one set of politicians and abused by another ; amongst its critics were Dr Markham, archbishop of York, John Wesley, and Edmund Burke; and its author rapidly became one of the best-known men in England. In recognition of his services in the cause of liberty by the publication of this pamphlet Dr Price was presented with the freedom of the city of London, and it is said that the encouragement derived from this book had no inconsiderable share in determining the Americans to declare their independence. A second pamphlet on the war with America, the debts of Great Britain, and kindred topics followed in the spring of 1777, and whenever the Government thought proper to proclaim a fast- day Dr Price took the opportunity of declaring his sentiments on the folly and mischief of the war. His name thus became identified, for good repute and for evil repute, with the cause of American independence. He was the intimate friend of Franklin ; he corresponded with Turgot ; and in the winter of 1778 he was actually invited by Congress to transfer himself to America and assist in the financial administration of the insurgent States. This offer he refused from unwillingness to quit his own country and his family connexions, concluding his letter, however, with the prophetic words that he looked &quot;to the United States as now the hope, and likely soon to become the refuge, of mankind.&quot; One of Price s most intimate friends was the celebrated Dr Priestley, but this circumstance did not prevent them from taking the most opposite views on the great questions of morals and metaphysics. In 1778 appeared a published correspondence between these two liberal theologians on the subjects of materialism and necessity, wherein Price maintains, in opposition to Priestley, the free agency of man and the unity and immateriality of the human soul. Both Price and Priestley were in theological opinion what would now vaguely be called &quot; Unitarians,&quot; though they occupied respectively the extreme right and the extreme left position of that school. Indeed Price s opinions would seem to have been rather Arian than Socinian. After the publication of his pamphlet on the American war Dr Price became an important personage. He now preached to crowded congregations, and, when Lord Shel burne acceded to power, not only was he offered the post of private secretary to the premier, but it is said that one of the paragraphs in the king s speech was suggested by him and even inserted in his very words. In 1786 Mrs Price died, and as there were no children by the marriage, and his own health was failing, the remainder of Price s life appears to have been somewhat 1 Lord Overstone reprinted in 1857, for private circulation, Price s and other rare tracts on the national debt and the sinking fund. XIX. 91