by Richard Price
Richard Price (1723–1791) was a Unitarian minister in London and a writer on moral philosophy, population, and the national debt, among other topics. The British statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke singled out Price's Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), delivered a scant two and a half months after the Fall of the Bastille, for attack in his antirevolutionary Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which inaugurated a protracted and violent debate in England between those who favored and those who opposed the French Revolution. The full title of Price's address is A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, Delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain. The "Revolution" being commemorated — the subject of the first two-thirds of the extracts given here — is the "bloodless" Glorious Revolution of 1688, which ended the short reign of James II. In the final third, beginning "What an eventful period is this!" Price greets with religious fervor "two other Revolutions" — that is, the American and the French revolutions.
Richard Price was a British moral philosopher and preacher in the tradition of English Dissenters, and a political pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the American Revolution. He fostered connections between a large number of people, including writers of the Constitution of the United States. He spent most of his adult life as minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church, where possibly the congregant he most influenced was early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who extended his ideas on the egalitarianism inherent in the spirit of the French Revolution to encompass women's rights as well. In addition to his work as a moral and political philosopher, he also wrote on issues of statistics and finance, and was inducted into the Royal Society for these contributions.
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