 |
  |
|
|
Revolution and Romanticism
|
||
A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth ISBN 1 85477 108 6 200 x 127 mm 104 pages |
RICHARD PRICE Discourse on the Love of our Country 1789 Richard Price, friend of Franklin and Priestley, is today chiefly known because this pamphlet, preached as a sermon at the Old Jewry on 4 November 1789, provoked Burke’s indignant Reflections on the Revolution in France. Price represents British radical thinking, in the period immediately before Paine’s Rights of Man and Godwin’s Political Justice. His writings on the American Revolution had welcomed events in the New World as an example to the Old. Confronted in 1789 by the fall of the Bastille he exclaims at the end of the Discourse, ‘What an eventful period is this!... I have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever; and nations panting for liberty, which seemed to have lost the idea of it... methinks, I see the ardor for liberty catching and spreading; a general amendment in human affairs.’ Even Pitt, at this early stage, welcomed the Revolution. Price and his audience sent to the National Assembly in Paris a message of congratulations that is included as an appendix in our text of the second edition of the Discourse. £21 $40 Tremble all ye oppressors of the world! Take warning all ye supporters of slavish governments, and slavish hierarchies!... You cannot now hold the world in darkness. Struggle no longer against increasing light and liberality. Restore to mankind their rights; and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed altogether. |
|
  |
||
