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or to confound the very nature and essences of things, by a kind of transubstantiation, like that of Dean Swift's Lord Peter, who could cut a slice of vension out of a loaf of brown bread: just so doth the judge in this case make slander or offence falsehood and malice.Which is the greatest juggle?

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Mistake me not, Mr. Editor, I do not mean to inculpate the genuine aud venerable law of England, but only an abuse of the law, a corrup tion, to which, as I observed in my last, our law has been subject from the earliest times; and if Andrew Horne was well thought of for pointing out such abuses in Edward the First's time, it will not, I presume, be thought criminal to do the same thing now. That this is an abuse is manifest: as Lord Folkestone truly remarked,— A very different con"struction of libel existed in ancient "times, of which the form of in"dictment would be a proof, where "there no other remaining." Very different likewise was the veneration entertained by our ancestors for TRUTH: So far from thinking that it could ever become the object of just punishment, under any circumstan ces whatever, they bowed to it, as to the voice of the Deity himself! Their judicial sentences, or veredicta, were, as it has been shewn, a reli gions appeal to it, made in the most solemn manner. One maxim with them was, ludicium pro veritate accipitur, which accords perfectly with the Divine injunction, execute the judgments of truth and peace in your gates. But I should be glad to know, Mr. Editor, how that judgment could be received as a truth, which had been rendered in defiance and contempt of it; where the truth had been offered in testimony, and refused. No; if our ancestors had ever acknowledged the modern doctrine of libels, it is most evident, that they never would have subscribed to the maxim, judicium pro

veritate accipitur. To say that all judgments are to be received and con sidered as truths, when they knew that many of them were given in consequence of a rejection of it, would have been a satire upon their own proceedings,

Another maxim current among our ancestors would, had they possessed certain modern notions about libels, have been a cutting sarcasm, instead of a laudable and generally admired sentiment: veritas, a quocunque dicitur, a Deo est: the truth, through whatever channel it may flow to us, comes from God. This is a most excellent maxim of law, and does honour to our ancient jurisprudence. It shews that it was not the rank or quality of a witness that our ancestors regarded, but the truth of the testimony. A quocunque dicitur! Plebeian truth was, in their estimation, to be preferred to princely prevarication; the testimony of a poor moral man, to that of a profligate peer. The reader will find these two law-maxins where, I am confident, he will not find the novel doctrine, that "truth is a libel"-I mean in Lord Coke's Institutes; and I beg him to consider how cordially that doctrine would have agreed with them, had our ancestors taken it into their heads to adopt all three: after acknowledging that truth proceeds from God, it would have well behoved them to punish it as a criminal offence! This would have been very consistent, truly, with their piety and morality. Fleta has given the description of the persons whom the King ought to choose for his ministers of justice; he says, "They ought "to be men of wisdom, who fear "God, and adhere strictly to the "truth. Viri sapientis, Deum que "timentes, in quibus consistit veritas

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supposes that truth may be criminal. That the judge, agreeably to our laws and institutions, was to be a man who "feared God, and sacred"ly adhered to truth," as hath been just proved; the jury were sworn, ad veritatem dicendam, to report the truth, and consequently were bound by their oath to get at it, if possible: the judgment was to be received as truth itself, pro veritate accipitur, and to be dictum veritatis, a true sentence, supposed indeed to have been prompted by HIM from whom all truth proceeds, and whose spirit was thought to preside on the occasion; for that was the sentiment respecting the trial of a man by "God "and his country." And as the Deity was supposed by our ancestors to inspire men with the love of truth, so was the devil supposed to instigate them to tell lies; and hence a libel is described by the indictment, to be a "false, wicked, and mali"cious" publication, done at the แ instigation of the devil." Now let the reader consider duly all these strong points and characteristic circumstances, and then tell me, if it be likely, that such men, with such sentiments, habits, and opinions, should treat truth as if it were falsehood, and bestow upon that virtue, the punishment which, in the general estimation of the whole nation, was due to its opposite vice? Can it be supposed, that if one of our forefathers had been arraigned for" a false and malicious libel, done at the instigation of the devil," and he should have disclaimed the falsehood and the malice imputed to him, as well as the diabolical instigation, declaring, that instead thereof, it was done in purity of heart, and offering the truth in justification; can it be supposed, I ask, that such a justification would have been refused, and that falsehood would be imputed to one who offered to prove the truth, but was debarred from doing it? I ask, also, would such a

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But what could induce twelve "good men and true" to prove such false traitors(as our ancestors phrased: it) to God and their country? What could induce such men to brave the、 just vengeance of heaven, by substi tuting falsehood for a dictum veritatis, and call that falsehood God's judgment, and his truth? Is it likely that twelve men, selected from so many, as good and true men (the qualification required for a juryinan, even down to this day) should, on so momentous an occasion, turn all at once reprobates and blasphemers; for what greater blasphemy and profanation could men be guilty of than this? What greater insult could they offer to the majesty of heaven, what greater fraud could they practice upon earth? What, I beg leave to ask, are all our modern forgeries of wills, or bonds, or bills of exchange, to, such a forgery as this? What indeed. but petty peccadilloes in comparison to the forging of a solemn declaration, which is to pass as the judgment of God through the illumination of man's conscience? What fraud can be compared to that of substituting the instigations of diabolical falsehood for the inspirations of divine truth? Well might such men be supposed to have deserted the God of truth, and gone over to the standard of his grand adversary, the Devil, the eternal father of falsehood and treachery. This, I am sure, would have been the conclusion; it would indeed be a glaring inconsistency and contradiction, the sentiments and habits of our ancestors duly considered, to suppose otherwise. We may therefore say,

with full assurance, that no judge, in those days, ever presumed to tell a defendant, that the truth would not benefit him if brought forward in his vindication; or yet to tell a jury that they ought not to hearken to such a species of justification. Such language might do to such an ignoramus as George Baylis; but not to the jurymen of those days, who appear to have been much better acquainted with that important duty.

This is not difficult to account for. In those times county courts and hundred courts made juries much more common than they are at present: they were not dictated to by the bench, or bamboozled, blinded, and bewildered by the counsel. There was more plain dealing, and fewer Counsellor " Bother'ems" in the practice of the bar in those days. The proceedings were not read over in a rapid, rattling way, so as to be unintelligible; nor were the old terms and phrases, which so few now understand, to them uncouth. There was, in short, no wish to mislead them, or convert them into judicial parrots who repeat merely a few words put into their mouths, without understanding them. None of those persons would have been so stupid as to ask who Mr. Verdict was: nor were they hurried as is too commonly the case at present. We have it on record, that the jury of a county court (Kent) sat three days in the time of William I. before they could satisfy their consciences respecting their verdict, in an intricate case. There is every reason to believe that these laudable jurors never found a man guilty of they knew not what, upon an indictment which they could neither distinctly hear, nor understand. When a man was charged with a libel, they saw clearly from the indictment, that the criminality of the charge consisted in falsehood and malice, at the instigation of the devil, whose existence was not apo

chryphal with them; and they took care that the charge was made out, and substantiated. It would not have done, to have told them, that falsehood and malice meant nothing more than something satirical, or offensive to the feelings of some great peculator or oppressor of the public! It would not have done, to have said to them, that they must take implicitly that representation, and reject the offered testimony of truth, for this would have been an insult to their honesty: perhaps they would have replied to the person who made to them such an offensive proposition, that they must enquire, for that they were the peer's of the party, and his only judges; that they had impawned the salvation of their souls to make a true deliverance, and must answer the consequences to God, and not to him! But it would have been held by them the consummation of all that was insulting, and horrible, and profane, to have been required to attest as the judgment of Gud, what they did not, in conscience, believe to be true, what, on the contrary, they knew to be the consequence of a rejection of such testimony. From all that I have been able to gather, in the course of my reading, respecting the senti ments of our bold, ingenuous, and upright ancestors, I should really suppose, Mr. Editor, that it would not have been quite safe for any man, however protected by rank or office, to have made them such a proposi tion. I do not mean to say, that they would have dragged him from the Bench; although I am persua ded they would have impeached him in parliament; the members of which were, at that time, in reality, and not supposititiously, knights, citizens and burgesses, that is, of the same character and description as the jurors.

Having taken a view of characters and consistencies on one side of the question, I shall now follow the

same plan with respect to the other; and shew, that it is not more natural that our ancestors, previous to the despotic reigns of the Stuarts, should have reprobated the doctrine, that truth may be a liber, than that its adoption should have taken place afterwards by the judges of those despotic days: for what, I beg leave to ask, were the judges in general, in the reigns of Charles and his two sons, but unprincipled lawmen? And not the most skilful in their professions neither, for the government that wants the best tool is not at liberty to select the best lawyer. They were the men who declared ship money to be legal, who, by the refusal of writs of Habeas Corpus, favoured the court in their unlawful imprisonment of those who refused to comply with the forced loans, and who, by their quo warrantos, took from the free towns their charters, only that Charles II. might sell them new ones. They were the men too, who, in James the Second's time, declared,' that the king could dispense with the law; and, in addressing him from the society of the middle temple, promised, that they would maintain with their last breath the doctrine, a Deo Rex, a Rege Lex. These were I admit some few honourable exceptions, as that of Mr. Justice Powell, Somers, Truby, &c. but the generality of lawmen, in that day, were abject and obsequious slaves to the will of the reigning despot: they asserted divine right, and passive obedience, and therefore it was consistent with them to maintain that the measures of government could not be impugned; for he who thinks he has received a right from heaven, and is only responsible to it for his conduct, thinks himself above all laws, and charters, and constitutions whatever; his subjects he conceives are bound to submit, even though they should be exterminated to a man, like the Thebeian Legion, whose example

VOL. IX.

was preached up from the pulpits in those times, whilst from the Bench the not less accursed doctrine was promulged, that the King is above the laws. Such was the disposition of those days, when tyranny and oppression engendered together the odious doctrine, that truth may be a libel, a doctrine that holds mortal enmity with the religion, the laws, and the moral principles of Englishmen. It was very consistent then for Chief Justice Wright, a creature of the court, as Rapin truly calls him, to say, that " any thing that "shall disturb the government, or "make a mischief, or stir among "the people was a famous libel:" in other words, any thing that should disturb or prevent his tyrannical master James II. from prosecuting the infernal scheme, in which he was then engaged, of enslaving both the bodies and souls of the English nation, any thing, of that nature or tendency, he very consistenly, pronounced to be a libel, whilst Mr. Justice Powel declared a libel to be that which he found it described, and set forth, in the body of the indictment, agreeably to the old form, and practice of the law of England, namely, a publication, composed of these diabolical ingre dients, falsehood, malice, and sedition: For gentlemen, said this honest Judge, who shines so bright by contrast, to make it a libel it "must be false, it must be malicious, "and it must tend to sedition."Then comes Mr. Justice Allybone, who cooks up the doctrine afresh, after his own papistical fashion, in which we are not surprised to find nonsense and contradiction, because they are so congenial with his creed! He give us a still stronger infusion of the despotic, and the passive obedient, for he tells us," that it is a "libel to write against the actual "exercise of the government, without "its leave," as if a despotic government would give leave to people to

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write against it; and he tells us too, "that it makes no odds, whether "that which is written is right or wrong, true or false, for the criminality consists in writing against "the exercise of the government without its leave." Now I beg the reader to reflect a moment, and he will see how impossible it is for any man, to have said this, except one who believed in divine right, one who considered the King as bound by no tie whatever upon earth; for if he had supposed him under the restriction of any law, as Magna Charta for instance, then he must have supposed the possibility of such a breach of the constitution, such an exercise of the government as would have justified a complaint against the exercise of the government; a complaint, breathing the language of truth, and founded on the just basis of the law and the constitution; but this miscreant, although he was a judge, had no conception of the justice of any such possible complaint, and therefore his dictum was, that " no man can "take upon him to write against "the actual exercise of the government, unless he have leave of the government, but he makes a libel, "be what he writes true or false;" which, to use the words of Bishop Burnet, "is as good nonsense as "could be expected from the jargon

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"of chicane."-One remark how. ever, I hope will not escape the reader; the depravity exhibited by these two wretches, the disgrace not only of their profession, but of their species; Wright and Allybone's, who make use of such ridiculous pretences to ensnare the consciences of the Jury, that questionless they must have supposed them all to be such ignoramuses as poor George Baylis, and his crew, or at least hoped they would turn out to be such for they hoped to persuade them, that a writing published without the leave of the government, or one which was likely to disturb it, was the same thing as a writing containing malice and falsehood; and although they knew that the salvation of these twelve good men was staked upon the true deliverance of the party, yet were they anx ious, by a legal juggle, to mislead them in this important point. Is it possible to conceive a more degraded state of human depravity? Such were the judges with whom the doctrine originated-Truth is a libel! May Judges in all succeeding ages, who may be inclined to follow their example, take warning by that ig nominy which has so justly been their fate. I am &c.. TIMOTHY TRUEMAN. Devonshire, May 13, 1811.

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