The Judicial History of Individual Liberty. is not to be permitted in any man—it is un constitutional and seditious." During the next twenty years the only notable State prosecutions for libel were those against Burdett, in 1820, and Williams, in 1822. Sir Francis Burdett vas an aristocrat who
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length he found that some of his associates were bent upon revolution rather than re form, he withdrew his support, and was re garded by the advanced radicals, before his death, as a renegade. The libel for which he was prosecuted was a long letter to the electors of Westminster, which he had pub-
BARON WOOD.
had imbibed the spirit of the French repub licans. Entering Parliament in 1796 he soon became an active critic of the government, and a versatile, if somewhat violent, advo cate of free speech. Although looked upon as a radical and a visionary, he lived to sec most of the reforms which he had advocated adopted by the government. When at
lished in a London newspaper, denouncing in severe terms the action of the authorities in connection with the "Peterloo Massacre" at Manchester. "Will the gentlemen of England," he said, support or wink at such proceedings—they never can stand tamely by as lookers on while bloody heroes rip open their mother's womb; they must join
