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counsel and jury. Justice Buller told the jury that their verdict was not correct; if they added the word "only" it would nega tive the innuendoes, which they stated that they did not mean to negative. Erskine in sisted that the verdict was similar to that given in Woodfall's case and should be re corded. In the end, however, the jury ac cepted Justice Buller's statement of their verdict. At the following term Erskine moved for a new trial, and upon the rule then granted he delivered before the Court of King's Bench a very elaborate and power ful argument in support of his views. But that argument was unsuccessful. Lord Mans field asserted that the uniform practice, which Justice Buller had simply followed, was "not to be shaken by arguments of general theory or popular declamation." Erskine afterward succeeded in arresting judgment on the ground that the matter set forth in the in dictment was not libellous. In 1789 Erskine very skilfully secured the acquittal of Stockdale, a London bookseller, charged with the publication of a libel on the House of Commons (22 St. Tr. 237). The pamphlet in controversy was designed to answer the charges against Warren Hast ings, which had been printed and circulated long before Hasting's trial. The writer of the pamphlet plainly asserted that the charges against Hastings had their origin in misrepresentation and falsehood; that
the House of Commons, in the prosecution of some of the charges, was "a tribunal of inquisition rather than a Court of Parlia ment," and that the impeachment was car ried on from "motives of personal animosity, not from regard to public justice." Al though Lord Chief Justice Kenyon directed the jury in the usual way, Erskine secured an acquittal upon his theory that the pamphlet, as a whole, referred, not to the House of Commons as a whole, nor to the public con duct of its members, but to the proceedings of particular persons, and that the aver ments which were necessary to sustain the information were therefore untrue. Three years later, through the efforts of Charles James Fox and of Lord Camden, the doctrine which Erskine had so eloquently advocated was adopted by statute in Fox's Libel Act of 1792. The prosecution of Horne-Tooke, in 1777 (20 St. Tr. OST), for publishing a statement that the British troops employed against the Americans were murderers, deserves men tion, in passing, for the cleverness, as well as the impudence, with which this experi enced agitator defended himself. He dis played much skill in avoiding Lord Mans field's rulings on the question of intent; and although he sorely tried the patience of the chief justice, he was allowed remarkable lati tude in his energetic but unsuccessful efforts to avoid conviction.
