He had a good deal of John Brown's fear that luxury was the seed of English degeneration; the proof of which he saw in the decline of the population.

His figures, in fact, were false; but they were unessential to the general thesis he had to make.
Price, like Priestley a leading Nonconformist, was stirred to print by the American Revolution; and if his views were not widely popular, his _Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty_ (1776) attained its eighth edition within a decade.

This, with its supplement _Additional Observations_ (1777), presents a perfectly coherent theory.

Nor is their ancestry concealed.

They represent the tradition of Locke, modified by the importations of Rousseau.