Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/504

488, but such was the dread of his unpopularity that nobody would let him have a house, from an apprehension that it would be burned by the populace. He was obliged to get a friend to take the lease for him, and it was with the utmost difficulty that he could prevail with the landlord to transfer the lease to him, as he alleged that he was not only afraid that it would be demolished, but that his own residence, twenty miles off, would go next. When he got settled, his friends living near were advised to remove their valuable effects. Servants could not be induced to stay with him, and his neighbors were in fear of damage by his presence. The members of the Royal Society, of which he was a fellow, declined admitting him to their company, and he was obliged to withdraw his name from the Society. His eldest son was in business in Manchester with a partner who, although a man of liberality himself, was so panic-struck by the state of the public mind that he dissolved the business connection. Dr. Priestley was burned in effigy with Paine, and threatened and denounced in private letters. At a dinner of the prebendaries of a cathedral church, the conversation turning on the riots in Birmingham, and on a clergyman having said that if Dr. Priestley were mounted on a pile of his publications he would set fire to them and burn him alive, they all declared that they would be ready to do the same. Dr. Priestley had been a friend of Edmund Burke, who wrote a furious book against the French. This was replied to by Priestley so ably that the orator was greatly exasperated and inveighed against his friend's character repeatedly in the House of Commons. Dr. Priestley denied his charges, and called on him for proof again and again, but he made no reply, whereupon the doctor published that Burke "had neither ability to maintain his charge nor virtue to retract it." Dr. Priestley was informed, by a person who was boarding at the same house with Burke at Margate when the riots broke out at Birmingham, "that he could not contain his joy, but, running from place to place, he expressed it in the most unequivocal manner."

The prolonged persecution to which Priestley was subjected after the riots, and the extent and virulence of the feeling against him, show that the affair was something more than the mere outbreak of the Birmingham mob, and the course taken by government sufficiently attests that the riotous populace were but the tools of their superiors. While the country in general evidently exulted in his sufferings, the representatives of the nation refused to inquire into the cause of them. The courts delayed to give him the damages to which he was entitled, and their award fell $10,000 short of his real loss. As an illustration of the spirit which ruled the dispensation of justice, it may be mentioned that the manuscript of a work on the Constitution of England, as large as "Blackstone's Commentaries," was destroyed, and Priestley's own lawyer advised him not to make a claim for it, because it would be ruled as a seditious work and aggravate his case. Accordingly, this