Priestley in America | Page 7

bigotry and despotism, and they would deem themselves, an unworthy progeny were they not highly interested in your safety and happiness.
It is not alone because your various useful publications evince a life devoted to literature and the industrious pursuit of knowledge; not only because your numerous discoveries in Nature are so efficient to the progression of human happiness: but they have long known you to be the friend of mankind and in defiance of calumny and malice, an asserter of the rights of conscience and the champion of civil and religious liberty.
They have learned with regret and indignation the abandoned proceedings of those spoilers who destroyed your house and goods, ruined your philosophical apparatus and library, committed to the flames your manuscripts, pryed into the secrets of your private papers, and in their barbarian fury put your life itself in danger. They heard you also with exalted benevolence return unto them "blessings for curses:" and while you thus exemplified the undaunted integrity of the patriot, the mild and forbearing virtues of the Christian, they hailed you victor in this magnanimous triumph over your enemies.
You have fled from the rude arm of violence, from the flames of bigotry, from the rod of lawless power: and you shall find refuge in the bosom of freedom, of peace, and of Americans.
You have left your native land, a country doubtless ever dear to you--a country for whose improvement in virtue and knowledge you have long disinterestedly laboured, for which its rewards are ingratitude, injustice and banishment. A country although now presenting a prospect frightful to the eyes of humanity, yet once the nurse of science, of arts, of heroes, and of freeman--a country which although at present apparently self devoted to destruction, we fondly hope may yet tread back the steps of infamy and ruin, and once more rise conspicuous among the free nations of the earth. In this advanced period of your life, when nature demands the sweets of tranquility, you have been constrained to encounter the tempestous deep, to risk disappointed prospects in a foreign land, to give up the satisfaction of domestic quiet, to tear yourself from the friends of your youth, from a numerous acquaintance who revere and love you, and will long deplore your loss.
We enter, Sir, with emotion and sympathy into the numerous sacrifices you must have made, to an undertaking which so eminently exhibits our country as an asylum for the persecuted and oppressed, and into those regretful sensibilities your heart experienced when the shores of your native land were lessening to your view.
Alive to the impressions of this occasion we give you a warm and hearty welcome into these United States. We trust a country worthy of you; where Providence has unfolded a scene as new as it is august, as felicitating as it is unexampled. The enjoyment of liberty with but one disgraceful exception, pervades every class of citizens. A catholic and sincere spirit of toleration regulates society which rises into zeal when the sacred rights of humanity are invaded. And there exists a sentiment of free and candid inquiry which disdains shackles of tradition, promising a rich harvest of improvement and the glorious triumphs of truth. We hope, Sir, that the Great Being whose laws and works you have made the study of your life, will smile upon and bless you--restore you to every domestic and philosophical enjoyment, prosper you in every undertaking, beneficial to mankind, render you, as you have been to your own, the ornament of this country, and crown you at last with immortal felicity and honour.
And to this the venerable scientist was pleased to say:
Gentlemen,
I think myself greatly honoured, flying as I do, from ill treatment in my native country, on account of my attachment to the cause of civil and religious liberty, to be received with the congratulations of "a Society of Freemen associated to cultivate the love of liberty, and the enjoyment of a happy Republican government." Happy would our venerable ancestors, as you justly call them, have been, to have found America such a retreat for them as it is to me, when they were driven hither; but happy has it proved to me, and happy will it be for the world, that in the wise and benevolent order of Providence, abuses of power are ever destructive of itself, and favourable to liberty. Their strenuous exertions and yours now give me that asylum which at my time of life is peculiarly grateful to me, who only wish to continue unmolested those pursuits of various literature to which, without having ever entered into any political connexions my life has been devoted.
I join you in viewing with regret the unfavourable prospect of Great Britain formerly, as you say, the nurse of science, and of freemen, and wish with you,