The Judicial History of Individual Liberty. found guilty, the principles of liberty and toleration so eloquently expounded by Erskine in this case are the foundation upon which liberty of opinion is now established. "If, in the march of the human mind," he said, no man could have gone before the establishments of the time he lives in, how could our establishment, by reiterated changes, have become what it is? If no man could have awakened the public mind to errors and abuses in our government, how could it have passed on from stage to stage, through reformation and revolution, so as to have arrived from barbarism to such a pitch of happiness and perfection that the Attorney-General considers it a profanation to touch it further, or to look for any future amendment? In this manner power has rea soned in every age; government, in its own estimation, has been at all times a system ot perfection; but a free press has examined and detected its errors, and the people have from time to time reformed them." Whatever justification there may have been for the prosecution of Paine, the trial and conviction of John Frost (22 St. Tr. 471) was an unmitigated outrage. Frost was a respectable attorney who had been former ly associated with Pitt and others in pro moting parliamentary reform. For saying in a coffee house, while he was more or less under the influence of wine, that he was for equality and no king, and that the con stitution of the country was a bad one, he was convicted of speaking seditious words, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment, to stand in the pillory at Charing Cross, and was struck off the roll of attorneys. The case of Lambert and Perry, pub lisher and proprietor respectively of the Morning Chronicle (22 St. Tr. 953), was the first trial under the Libel Act of 1792. The defendants had published in their paper an address of a society for political infor mation, entitled, "An Address to the Friends of Free Inquiry and the Public
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Good." The substance of the paper was that deep and alarming abuses existed in the government, which called for reform in representation; but that free inquiry was suppressed by prosecutions. It was argued for the crown that, in view of the turbulence of the times, the motive of the defendants in publishing the article must have been criminal. Erskine's powerful advocacy was successful in overcoming this scanda lous prosecution. The jury at first returned a verdict of "guilty of publishing, but with no malicious intent,1' which Lord Chief Jus tice Kenyon refused to receive. Thereupon the jury found a general verdict of not guilty. The repressive measures of the govern ment culminated in the last year of the cen tury. Between the license and excesses of one party, and the fears and arbitrary ac tions of another, liberty of opinion was completely suppressed. The government and the mass of the people were brought into painful conflict, and the severity of the authorities was met by sullen exasperations and violent denunciation on the part of the people. The trial of Gilbert Wakefield in 1799 is a striking illustration of this painful conflict of public temper. We find Wakefield, an eminent scholar, seeking in inflammatory language, to dissuade the people from re sisting foreign invasion of their country, and suffering therefor an imprisonment which was equivalent to a death sentence (27 St. Tr. 679). Cuthell's case illustrates the extent to which book-sellers and publishers were held criminally liable for acts of their servants done under general authority and without actual knowledge. Cuthell was a book seller who had never read the work for which he was condemned, and did not even know that it was a political work (27 St. Tr. 641)-
