LAWS, 



Such is the effect of that confidence, which a good and just govern 

 ment has in the people whom it governs 1 



415. There is one more particular, as to the Laws of America, 

 on which, as it is of very great importance, I think it right to 

 remark. The uses, which have been made of the Law of Libel in 

 England are well known. In the first place, the Common Law 

 knows of no such offence as that of criminal libel, for which so 

 many men have been so cruelly punished in England. The crime 

 is an invention of late date. The Common Law punished men 

 for breaches of the peace, but no words, whether written or spoken, 

 can be a breach of the peace. But, then some Boroughmonger 

 judges said, that words might tend to produce a breach of the peace ; 

 and that, therefore, it was criminal to use such words. This, 

 though a palpable stretch of law, did, however, by usage, become 

 law so far as to be acted upon in America as well as in England ; 

 and, when I lived in the State of PENNSYLVANIA, eighteen years 

 ago, the Chief Justice of that State, finding even this law not 

 sufficiently large, gave it another stretch to make it fit me. 

 Whether the Legislature of that State will repair this act of 

 injustice and tyranny remains yet to be seen. 



416. The State of NEW YORK, in which I now live, awakened, 

 probably by the act of tyranny, to which I allude, has taken care, 

 by an Act of the State, passed in 1805, to put an end to those 

 attacks on the press by charges of constructive libel, or, at least, to 

 make the law such, that no man shall suffer from the preferring 

 of any such charges unjustly. 



417. The principal effect of this twisting of the law was, that, 

 whether the words published were true or false the crime of pub 

 lishing was the same : because, whether true or false, they tended 

 to a breach of the peace ! Nay, there was a Boroughmonger Judge 

 in England, who had laid it down as law, that the truer the words 

 were, the more criminal was the libel ; because, said he, a breach 

 of the peace was more likely to be produced by telling truth of a 

 villain, than by telling falsehood of a virtuous man. In point of 

 fact, this was true enough, to be sure ; but what an infamous 

 doctrine ! What a base, what an unjust mind must this man 

 have had ! 



418. The State of New York, ashamed that there should any 

 longer be room for such miserable quibbling ; ashamed to leave 

 the Liberty of the Press exposed to the changes and chances of a 

 doctrine so hostile to common sense as well as to every principle 

 of freedom, passed an Act, which makes the truth of any pub 

 lication a justification of it, provided the publisher can shew, that 

 the publication was made with good motives and justifiable ends : 

 and who can possibly publish truth without being able to shew 

 good motives and justifiable ends ? To expose and censure 

 tyranny, profligacy, fraud, hypocrisy, debauchery, drunkenness : 

 indeed, all sorts of wickedness and folly ; and to do this in the 

 words of truth, must tend, cannot fail to tend, to check wickedness 



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