The Judicial History of Individual Liberty. matter, Carlile continued: "The more tame you have grown the more you have been op pressed and despised, the more you have been trampled on; and it is only now that you begin to display physical as well as your moral strength that your cruel tyrants treat with you and offer terms of pacification. Your demands have been so far moderate and just, and any attempt to stifle them will be so wicked as to justify your resistance, even to death and to life for life." Carlile defended himself well, but the jury found him guilty of seditious libel (2 St. Tr. N. S-, 459)Cobbett was prosecuted in the same year for a similar publication in the Political Register with reference to the fires and the destruction of threshing machines in Hamp shire and Wiltshire. He was tried before Lord Chief Justice Abbott, with Denrnan as prosecutor. Cobbett defended himself with great ability and with even more than his customary virulence. In a speech of four and a half hours' duration he flayed the gov ernment without restraint. After fifteen hours' deliberation the jury were unable to agree, and the prosecution was dropped (2 St. Tr. X. S., 789). In the trials of Howell, Collins, Lovett and others, for publications censuring in infiammatory language the action of the mili
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tia in dispersing a meeting at Birmingham, the law of seditious libel was formulated ac cording to modern conceptions by such judges as Alderson and Littledale. Noth ing short of direct incitement to disorder and violence is seditious libel (3 St. Tr. N. S, i r 49, et seq.) From about 1840 the freedom of the press and of public discussion may be said to have been completely established. The remain ing anomalies of the law of criminal libel were gradually removed by legislation. By Lord Campbell's Libel Act of 1843, a de fendant charged with criminal libel was al lowed to plead in defense that his words were true and published with good motives; and Lord Mansfield's doctrine with respect to the criminal liability of a publisher for the unauthorized acts of his servants was al tered by allowing the defendant in all cases to prove that such publication was made without his authority, consent or knowl edge, in the exercise of due care on his part. The policy of repression has at length been discredited and discarded, and State prosecutions for political libel are now prac tically as much a thing of the past as the censorship itself. The modern doctrine was distinctly formulated in Reg. z>- Sullivan, II Cox Crim. Cas. 195.
THE END.
