His conservatism, or, to give it the harsher name, his hostility to reform, was in great part due to timidity and insufficient knowledge of the world. He was a shy and reserved man, whose life was divided between one kind of narrowness at Westminster, and another kind of narrowness at Oxford. He was shut off from the real life of England. Among his books, which taught him that the state should foster trade, he could know only by hearsay of the new industrial movement then beginning to transform the country, and destined soon to sweep away the absurdities which he upheld, such as the innumerable attempts to fix the rate of wages, the navigation laws, and the statute of Charles II., commanding the people to bury their dead in wool. The very fact that he does not suggest a compromise between restriction of trade and its freedom, leads one to infer that he had never seriously thought about the question. Only with regard to apprenticeship does he mention that a doubt could exist, and then he refrains from giving a clear opinion. Amid the Toryism of Oxford, where he had seen students expelled for Methodists, Blackstone was hardly likely to understand what toleration, much less what religious freedom, meant. He deprecated persecution, once indeed he uses with unwonted energy the phrase “dæmon of persecution,”[12] but it is rather under the impulse of a mild humanity than from any trust in the people or any large love of liberty. When a strong protest was raised by Dr. Priestley and Dr. Furneaux against his account of the laws relating to Protestant Dissenters, whom almost in so many words he called dangerous citizens, he seems to have been quite surprised at the attack. He wrote a pamphlet in reply to Priestley, explaining that his aim had been to expound the law not justify it, which was not quite accurate, and declaring that he was all for tolerance; and he went so far as to expunge the most obnoxious sentence, and to give in subsequent editions a fuller and somewhat fairer account of the law. Even in its final form the passage is not worthy of one who was speaking from a position of really high authority, which should have induced judicial calmness. “They have made him sophisticate,” said Bentham, referring to Priestley’s and Furneaux’s attack; “they have made him even expunge; but all the doctors in the world, I doubt, would not bring him to confession.” Yet it is not so much utter illiberality of nature that the passage suggests as simple inexperience, and his fixed belief that truth must always be a compromise. He was but echoing the opinion commonly held by churchmen in his time, an opinion which he had never tested by contact with the people. [12] He is referring, however, to persecution on the Continent and by the Pope.