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therefore applies, and was meant to apply, to every interruption to writing, which, while they oppress the individual, endanger the state.

"We have them not," says Milton, "that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity or church, nor by any statute left us by our ancestors, elder or later, nor from the modern custom of any reformed city, or church abroad; but from the most antichristian council, and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever existed. Till then, books were ever as freely admitted into the world as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb."

"To the pure, all things are pure; not only meats and drink, but all kind of knowledge whether good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the book, if the will and conscience be not defiled.

"Bad books serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forwarn, and to illustrate. Whereof, what better witness can we expect I should produce, than one of your own now sitting in parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in this land, whose volume of natural and national laws, proves, not only by great authorities brought together, but by exquisite reasons and theorems almost mathematically demonstrative, that all opinions, yea, errour, known, read, and collated, are of main service and assistance toward the speedy attainment of what is truest.

"Opinions and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by tickets, and statutes, and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and license it like our broadcloth and our woolpacks.

"Nor is it to the common people less than a reproach; for if we be so jealous over them that we cannot trust them with an English pamphlet, what do we but censure them, for a giddy, vicious, and un

grounded people; in such a sick and weak estate of faith and discretion, as to be able to take nothing down but through the pipe of a licenser. That this is care or love of them we cannot pretend.

"Those corruptions which it seeks to prevent, break in faster at doors which cannot be shut.

"To prevent men thinking and acting for themselves, by restraints on the press, is like to the exploits of that gallant man, who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his park gate."

This obstructing violence meets for the most part with an event, utterly opposite to the end which it drives at: instead of suppressing books, it raises them, and invests them with a reputation. "The punishment of wits enhances their authority," saith the viscount St. Albans, " and a forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out."

He then adverts to his visit to the famous Galileo, whom he found and visited in the inquisition, " for not thinking in Astronomy with the Franciscan and Dominican monks." And what event ought more deeply to interest and affect us. The very laws of nature were to bend under the rod of a licenser. This illustrious astronomer ended his life within the bars of a prison, because in seeing the phases of Venus, through his newly invented telescope, he pronounced, that she shone with borrowed light, and from the sun as the centre of the universe. This was the mighty crime, the placing the sun in the centre; that sun which now inhabits it upon the foundation of mathematical truth, which enables us to traverse the pathless ocean, and to carry our line and rule amongst other worlds, which but for Galileo we had never known, perhaps even to the recesses of an infinite and immortal God.

Milton then in his most eloquent address to the parliament, puts the liberty of the press on its true and most honourable foundation. "Believe it lords and commons, they who counsel you to such a suppress

ing of books, do as good as bid you suppress yourselves; and I will soon show how.

"If it be desired to know the immediate cause of all this free writing and free speaking, there cannot be assigned a truer than your own mild, and free, and humane government. It is the liberty, lords and commons, which your own valourous and happy counsels have purchased us; liberty which is the nurse of all great wits. This is that which hath rarified and enlightened our spirits like the influence of heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged, and lifted up our apprehensions, degrees above themselves. Ye cannot make us now less capable, less knowing, less eagerly pursuing the truth, unless ye first make yourselves, that made us so, less the lovers, less the founders of our true liberty. We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formal, and slavish, as ye found us, but you then must first become that which ye cannot be; oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have freed us. That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts now more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in

us.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties."

Gentlemen, I will refer you to another author whose opinion you may think more in point, as having lived in our own times, and as holding the highest monarchical principles of government. I speak of Mr. Hume; who, nevertheless, considers, that this liberty of the press extends not only to abstract speculation, but to keep the publick on their guard against all the acts of their government.

After showing the advantages of a monarchy to publick freedom, provided it is duly controlled and watched by the popular part of the constitution, he says: "These principles account for the great liberty of the press in these kingdoms, beyond what is indulged in any other government. It is apprehended, that arbitrary power would steal in upon us were we not careful to prevent its progress, and were there not an easy method of conveying the alarm from one end of the kingdom to the other. The spirit of the people must frequently be roused, in order to curb the ambition of the court; and the dread of rousing this spirit must be employed to prevent that ambition. Nothing is so effectual to this purpose as the liberty of the press, by which all the learning, wit, and genius of the nation, may be employed on the side of freedom; and every one be animated to its defence. As long, therefore, as the republican part of our government can maintain itself against the monarchical, it will naturally be careful to keep the press open, as of importance to its own preservation."

There is another authority cotemporary with the last, a splendid speaker in the upper house of parliament, and who held during most of his time high offices under the king: I speak of the earl of Chesterfield, who thus expressed himself in the house of lords : "One of the greatest blessings, my lords, we enjoy, is liberty; but every good in this life has its alloy of evil-licentiousness is the alloy of liberty, it is"

Lord Kenyon. Dr. Johnson claims to pluck that feather from lord Chesterfield's wing; he speaks, I believe, of the eye of the political body.

Mr. Erskine. Gentlemen, I have heard it said, that lord Chesterfield borrowed that which I was just about to state, and which his lordship has anticipated.

Lord Kenyon. That very speech which did lord Chesterfield so much honour, is supposed to have been written by Dr. Johnson.

Mr. Erskine. Gentlemen, I believe it was, and I am much obliged to his lordship for giving me a far higher authority for my doctrine. For though lord Chesterfield was a man of great ingenuity and wit, he was undoubtedly far inferiour in learning and in monarchical opinion, to the celebrated writer to whom my lord has now delivered the work by his authority. Dr. Johnson then says: "One of the greatest blessings we enjoy, one of the greatest bless

ings a people, my lord, can enjoy is liberty; but every good in this life has its alloy of evil: licentiousness is the alloy of liberty: it is an ebullition, an excrescence; it is a speck upon the eye of the political body, which I can never touch but with a gentle, with a trembling hand, lest I destroy the body, lest I injure the eye upon which it is apt to appear.

"There is such a connexion between licentiousness and liberty, that it is not easy to correct the one, without dangerously wounding the other; it is extremely hard to distinguish the true limit between them. Like a changeable silk, we can easily see there are two different colours, but we cannot easily discover where the one ends or where the other begins."

I confess, I cannot help agreeing with this learned author. The danger of touching the press is the difficulty of making its limits. My learned friend who has just gone out of court, has drawn no line, and unfolded no principle. He has not told us, if this book is condemned, what book may be written. If I may not write against the existence of a monarchy, and recommend a republick, may I write against any part of the government? May I say that we should be better without a house of lords, or a house of commons, or a court of chancery, or any other given part of our establishment? Or if, as has been hinted, a work may become libellous for stating even legal matter with sarcastick phrase, the difficulty becomes the greater, and the liberty of the press more impossible to define.

The same author, pursuing the subject, and speaking of the fall of Roman liberty, says, "But this sort of liberty came soon after to be called licentiousness: for we are told that Augustus, after having established his empire, restored order in Rome by restraining licentiousness. God forbid we should in this country have order restored, or licentiousness restrained, at so dear a rate as the people of Rome paid for it to Augustus.