“I was in hopes to have been able to pay my friends of Birm. a visit long before this time, but was always discouraged, so that I have now given up the thoughts of it, and must content myself with seeing as many of them as I can here.... I do not, however, think I shall continue here long. Though unwillingly, I shall some time hence follow my son to France. But as I can _do_ nothing there I will stay here as long as I can.” To what lengths the Government were determined to go was seen in their banishment, in 1793, of Thomas Fyshe Palmer, a gentleman of a highly respectable and opulent family in Bedfordshire, to Botany Bay for seven years, because he had been concerned in publishing a paper in favour of Parliamentary Reform; and in their treatment of Mr Winterbotham, a Calvinistic minister of Plymouth Dock, on account of his political opinions. The mock trial of Mr Winterbotham at Newgate and the four years’ imprisonment which followed it, created a wide-spread feeling of indignation and alarm, and many families were constrained to leave the country in disgust. Among them was Priestley’s friend and fellow-sufferer, the worthy Mr Russell, who on his way to Boston, New England, was captured with his family by a French privateer and thrown into prison in Brest. Priestley, at length, also determined to follow them. It was however with the greatest reluctance that he came to that decision. It meant parting from affectionate and devoted friends to whom he was warmly attached, whose zeal to serve him and to minister to his wants far outweighed the hatred of those who sought to cover him with oblivion. It meant too the relinquishment in large measure of his philosophical pursuits since he could not hope to procure elsewhere the same facilities for inquiry that he enjoyed here. More than all it seemed to mean the relinquishment of what was still dearer to him—his active efforts in the propagation of Unitarianism. Lastly it meant in all human probability a lasting severance from the daughter to whom he was so tenderly attached. He was largely guided to his decision by consideration for his sons, since, as he says, he found that the bigotry of the country in general made it impossible for him to place them here with any advantage. His second son, William, had been some time in France, but on the breaking out of the troubles in that country he had embarked for America, where his two brothers, Joseph and Henry, met him. They had a project of founding a settlement near the head of the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania, and several of Priestley’s friends at home, among them Mr William Russell of Birmingham, a leader of the New Meeting-House, were directly interested in the scheme. Priestley at length decided to throw in his lot with his sons, and in the preface to his _Fast and Farewell Sermons_, which he delivered to his Hackney congregation on the eve of his departure, he gave his reasons for leaving the country:—