is not to be permitted in any man-it is unconstitutional 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 was an aristocrat who

length he found that some of his associates were bent upon revolution rather than reform, he withdrew his support, and was regarded 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

had imbibed the spirit of the French republicans. Entering Parliament in 1796 he soon became an active critic of the government, and a versatile, if somewhat violent, advocate 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

the general voice loudly demanding justice and redress, and head public meetings throughout the United Kingdom to put a stop in its commencement to a reign of terror and of blood, and ensure legal redress to the widows and orphans-mutilated victims of this unparalleled and barbarous outrage." He then proposed a meeting in Westminster for that purpose, adding, "whether the penalty of our meeting will be death by military execution I know not; but this I know, a man can die but once, and never better than in vindicating the laws and liberties of his country." Then, professing to doubt whether what he had written was libellous, he quoted the well-known incident of the soldiers on Hounslow Heath cheering the news of the acquittal of the seven bishops, and concluded with an attack upon military punishments. "Our duty is to meet; and England expects every man to do his duty."

Doubtful of a conviction in London, where the libel had been published, the government laid the indictment in the county of Leicester, where, their evidence tended to show, the letter to the newspaper had been posted by Burdett. At the trial Best held this sufficient proof of publication in Leicester, citing the ruling in Justice Johnson's case. Burdett was defended by Denman; he also addressed the jury in his own behalf, severely censuring the device of the government and the system of ex officio informations. With respect to the expressions used, he declared that if Locke had written his work on Government a few years earlier it would have been proscribed as a wicked and seditious libel. Best charged the jury in unmistakable terms, asserting that "more poisonous ingredients were never condensed on paper." The jury immediately returned a verdict of guilty. A motion was made for a new trial on Best's rulings, and the arguments of counsel and opinion of the court (Abbott, Bayley, Holroyd and Best)

on this motion constitute the most elaborate inquiry into the law of libel to be found in the books. The majority of the court, Bayley alone dissenting, sustained the ruling of the trial judge with respect to the publication in Leicester. The whole court agreed that the intention of a document is to be collected from the document itself, unless explained by the mode of publication, or other circumstances; that if the contents of a paper are likely to excite sedition, the writer must be presumed to have intended that which his act was likely to produce, and if the jury found such to be the fact, it was a libel (1 St. Tr. N. S. 1).

The celebrated prosecution of John Ambrose Williams for a libel on the clergy of Durham (St. Tr. N. S. 1291) is one of the most interesting of the modern trials. It arose out of the violent conflict of opinion over the proceedings against Queen Caroline. Upon the Queen's death the church bells in Durham had not been tolled, and the failure to observe this customary sign of mourning prompted Williams to publish in the Durham Chronicle a savage attack upon the clergy of that place. Its tenor may be gathered from the following passage: "We know not whether any orders were issued to prevent this customary sign of mourning; but the omission plainly indicates the kind of spirit which predominates among our clergy. Yet these men profess to be followers of Jesus Christ, to walk in his footsteps, to teach his precepts, to inculcate his spirit, to promote harmony, charity and Christian love! Out upon such hypocricy! It is such conduct which renders the very name of our established clergy odious till it stinks in the nostrils; that makes our churches look like deserted sepulchres, rather than temples of the living God; that raises up conventicles in every corner, and increases the brood of wild fanatics and enthusiasts; that causes our beneficed dignitaries to be regarded as

matter, Carlile continued: "The more tame you have grown the more you have been oppressed 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 Hampshire and Wiltshire. He was tried before Lord Chief Justice Abbott, with Denman 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 government without restraint. After fifteen hours' deliberation the jury were unable to agree, and the prosecution was dropped (2 St. Tr. N. S., 789).

In the trials of Howell, Collins, Lovett and others, for publications censuring in inflammatory language the action of the mili

tia in dispersing a meeting at Birmingham, the law of seditious libel was formulated according to modern conceptions by such judges as Alderson and Littledale. Nothing short of direct incitement to disorder and violence is seditious libel (3 St. Tr. N. S, 1149, et seq.)

From about 1840 the freedom of the press and of public discussion may be said to have been completely established. The remaining anomalies of the law of criminal libel were gradually removed by legislation. By Lord Campbell's Libel Act of 1843, a defendant charged with criminal libel was allowed 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 altered by allowing the defendant in all cases to prove that such publication was made without his authority, consent or knowledge, 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 practically as much a thing of the past as the censorship itself. The modern doctrine was distinctly formulated in Reg. 7 Sullivan, 11 Cox Crim. Cas. 195.