ABSTRACT

The government simply ignored the fact that they had lost the case and continued their use of spies to gain more evidence of revolutionary intent and brought in new legislation to stop the public meetings of radicals and the publication of radical political material. Edmund Burke's views on reason and government came to dominate the political stage and rational dissenters were forced to rethink their use of reason as a standard for political change. There is an ironic twist in the tale of Jeremiah Joyce's political career after Christmas 1795, the implications of which are frustratingly impossible to resolve yet quite intriguing. Joyce's educational project never completely lost its radical and dissenting agenda and he used the psychology of John Locke and David Hartley both as a model for child development and as an explanation for the causes of social injustice.