EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
770
1793, June 1 . Th$ PrettUm Revietc and County ililerrtwrr, printed by Thomns Walker, with this motto on the title-page. " A faithful historian is of no country, and the conductor of an impar- tial newspaper of no party."
1793, JwM 5. Daniel Isaac Eaton, book- seller, was tried at the Old Bailey, for publish- ing Paine's Rights of Man. The jury found , him " grtiltif of puhluhing, without a criminal intent. Verdict recorded, and admitted to bail. '
1793, July 19. Alexander White, who had been imprisoned in Newgate for five months, on ' a charge of writing and uttering a libel, took his trial at the quarter se^sions of Newcastle-upon- 1 Tyne. It appeared that Mr. White had written | a paper, which he bad reluctantly lent to Mr. Ridley, a friend, to be returned in the morning. While Mr. Ridley was reading the paper, it was snatched from him by Puncheon, one of the town seneants. The jury brought in a verdict, Not guilty of miblithing. The recorder objected to this, and toe jury immediately returned a
only whether the criminal pabliahed the paper— do not consider the nature at it — do not consider whether It cor- respood to the definition of treason or not" — woold SngUshroen endure that death should be inflicted wlthoat a Jury baring had an opportunity of delivering their sen- timents whether the Indiridual was or was not guilty of the crime with which he was charged i Having shown that the law of libels was contrary to the original principles of law. Fox said, that If the committee were clear as to tills podnt, their wisest and most proper measure would be to enact a declaratory law respecting it ; but if they were of opinion that high authorities on the other side made the law doabtfol, they might settle the law for the future without any reference to what it had been in Umea past. FItt a;;Teed with the principles stated by Fox, but instead of a committee of justice, recommended the bringing in a UU " to remoTe all doubt* respecting the rights and func- tions of Juries in criminal cases.** The bill was accordingly Introduced, and passed the commons, but on its transnols- ■ion to the house of lords, it was opposed on the second reading by the lord chancellor, on pretence of its being too late in the session to discuss a measure of such im- portance. The principle of the bill was ably defended by the law lords, Camden and Loughborough, with whom lord Qrenrille concurred; bat the biU was finally post- poned for that session ; and In the following one it was tri- nmphantly carried through both houses of parliament, and passed into a law, notwithstanding the violent oppo- sition of the law lords Thnrlow, Kenyon, and Bathnrst, who joined in a protest against the bUI, which will remain a perpetual monument of the triumph of equity and com- mon sense ov^ professional subtilty. In its present ano- malous state, the law of Ubel la yet Indefinable and in- definite, and remains a blot upon the freedom of the press, and against the liberty and property of the printer.
Sir John Scott was an attorney-general of exemplary Industry, of most pious veneration for the law of libel, and durln{^ his offidai career, he sate like an Incubus on the rising liberties of his country. Persecutions were the Elysium of Scott; he revelled In them with extscy, and prided himself on the number he had instituted ; and the most despotic autocrat could not have desired a state ser- vant of a more commendable sabmisslon to the " Divine Right," or more ready to evince it During a debate in 1795, he said "The house should remember that there bad been more prosecutions for libel wltbin the last two years than there had been for twenty years before.*' Had ft not been for the admirable firmness of juries, and tlie gigan- tic exertions of Ersklne— bad the remoiaeleu tyranny of the minister, the leanings of a partial Judge, and the In- defatigable labours of a most wlUlng attorney-general been suffered to prevail— all those who would notcroucb in the dust beneath the feet of the minister, would have been convinced of their errors by the logic of the executioner. — The crime of constructive treason wonld have been the s^nal of a scaffold massacre of all thinking men in Great Britain. Had Home Tooke and Hardy been sacrificed to the tender mercies of ritt, the head of Godwin would have been rolled upon the scaffold.
verdict of not guilty. Mr. White conducted his own case with considerable ability.
1793. T^ Cambridge Intelligencer. This paper was established by Benjamin Flower, and was one of the earliest provincial newspapers that denounced the war against republican France, as " wicked and absurd. Mr. Flower was a man of deep religious feeling; and the very excess of his sincerity made him the more strenuous in his ad- vocacy of the liberty of conscience. This formed a peculiar feature in his paper ; and considering the period at which it appeared — -with no friends in the field, but hosts of^opponents on all sides — it was an undertaking that required the noblest courage to originate, and the spirit of a martyr to sustain. It met with extraordinhry success, was read in all parts of the kingdom, and roused the dormant faculties of numbers to the dawning beams of public liberty, and increasing know- ledge. The freedom of his remarks, however, subjected him to prosecution and imprisonment. In 1797, a paragraph in his paper, on the subject of political subserviency, gave such offence to the house of lords, that be was imprisoned. " The argument, upon his case, in the court of king's bench, as well as in parliament, forms part of the constitutional history of England;" and, " the lords seemed to feel that they had stretched their privileges against the people to the utmost :" so before the end of the session he was liberated. The tide was too strong against him — ^his paper declined and was discontinued. He subsequently removed to Harlow, in Essex, where be carried on the printing business, and established a monthly magazine, upon the same principles, called the Political Register, but it had only a limited success. The powerful writ- ing of Mr. Flower, in his advocacy of the liberty of conscience, in reference to the publication of some works of Paine, and others of free theolo- gical discussion, produced a remarkable effect on the mind of Mr. (afterwards lord) Erskine who had just obtained a verdict of guilty against a printer named Williams. Having applied to the prosecutors — the managers of the society for the suppression of vice — to stay their proceedings, and they having refused, Erskine indignanUy threw up his brief, and left them to employ some less scrupulous agent, to call for judgment on the offender against a religion which was not more foully misrepresented in Am publication than in their proceedings.
1793. T%e Holy Bible, ytUh cuts, beautifully printed. It goes by the name of Heptinsall, the publisher. It is a very full size royal 4to.
- TAe Proceedingt of the Houu of Lord» in the Caae of
Benjamin Flower, printer of the Caji^ridge Intelligencer, for a euppoaed Libet on the Bishop of Ltand^f. with prefa- tory Remarks bp Mr. Ftower ; to wMeh are added the Argu- ments in the Court of King's Bench, on a Motion for an Habeas Corpus, and a PosUcript, containing Remarks on the Judgment of that Court, if Henry Cliford. Published by Crosby and Letterman .
- Amongst the many persons who were convicted of
pretended treason, in merely seeking a reform in the re- presentation of the people, and which has since come to pass, were Thomas Mnlr, a barrister, in Edinburgh, and Fystae Palmer, a Unitarian minister, at Dundee, were sen- tenced to transportation, in August, 1793.
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