66 Add too, that laws in doubtful points are to be interpreted according to the design of the legislator, where this can be certainly inferred. But the laws of England, which owe their own present supremacy and absoluteness to the good sense and generous dispositions diffused by the press more, far more, than to any other single cause, must needs be presumed favorable to its general influence. Even in the penalties attached to its abuse, we must suppose the legislature to have been actuated by the desire of preserving its essential privileges. The press is indifferently the passive instrument of evil and of good: nay, there is some good even in its evil. Good and evil we know," says Milton, in the Speech from which I have selected the motto of the preceding essay, "in the field of this world, grow up together almost inseparably: and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed."-" As, therefore, the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true way-faring Christian. I can not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.""That virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure."- Since, therefore, the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity, than by reading all manner of tractates, and hearing all manner of reason?"-Again-but, indeed the whole treatise is one strain of moral wisdom and political prudence :— "Why should we then affect a rigor contrary to the manner of God and of nature, by abridging or scanting those means, which books, freely permitted, are both to the trial of virtue and the but that horses may not be stolen. To what extent this is true, I shall have occasion to examine hereafter. exercise of truth? It would be better done to learn, that the law must needs be frivolous, which goes to restrain things uncertainly, and yet equally, working to good and to evil. And were I the chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil-doing. For God, sure, esteems the growth and completion of one virtuous person, more than the restraint of ten vicious." The evidence of history is strong in favor of the same principles, even in respect of their expediency. The average result of the press from Henry VIII. to Charles I. was such a diffusion of religious light as first redeemed and afterwards saved this nation from the spiritual and moral death of Popery; and in the following period it is to the press that we owe the gradual ascendency of those wise political maxims, which casting philo sophic truth in the moulds of national laws, customs, and existing orders of society, subverted the tyranny without suspending the government, and at length completed the mild and salutary revolution by the establishment of the house of Brunswick. To what must we attribute this vast over-balance of good in the general effects of the press, but to the over-balance of virtuous intention in those who employed the press? The law, therefore, will not refuse to manifest good intention a certain weight even in cases of apparent error, lest it should discourage and scare away those, to whose efforts we owe the comparative infrequency and weakness of error on the whole. The law may, however, nay, it must demand, that the external proofs of the author's honest intentions should be supported by the general style and matter of his work, and by the circumstances and mode of its publication. A passage, which in a grave and regular disquisition would be blameless, might become highly libellous and justly punishable if it were applied to present measures or persons for immediate purposes, in a cheap and popular tract. I have seldom felt greater indignation than at finding in a large manufactory a sixpenny pamphlet, containing a selection of inflammatory paragraphs from the prose-writings of Milton, without a hint given of the time, occasion, state of government, and other circumstances under which they were written—not a hint, that the freedom which we now enjoy, exceeds all that Milton dared hope for, or deemed practicable; and that his political creed sternly excluded the populace, and indeed the majority of the population, from all pretensions to political power. If the manifest bad intention would constitute this publication a seditious libel, a good intention equally manifest can not justly be denied its share of influence in producing a contrary verdict. Here then is the difficulty. From the very nature of a libel it is impossible so to define it, but that the most meritorious works will be found included in the description. Not from any defect or undue severity in the particular law, but from the very nature of the offence to be guarded against, a work recommending reform by the only rational mode of recommendation, that is, by the detection and exposure of corruption, abuse, or incapacity, might, though it should breathe the best and most unadulterated English feelings, be brought within the definition of libel equally with the vilest incendiary pamphlet, that ever aimed at leading and misleading the multitude. Not a paragraph in the Morning Post during the Peace of Amiens, (or rather the experimental truce so called,)—though to the immortal honor of the then editor, that newspaper was the chief secondary means of producing the unexampled national unanimity, with which the war recommenced and has since been continued,-not a paragraph warning the nation, as need was and most imperious duty commanded, of the perilous designs and unsleeping ambition of our neighbor, the mimic and caricaturist of Charlemagne, but was a punishable libel. The law of libel is a vast aviary, which encages the awakening cock and the geese whose alarum preserved the Capitol, no less than the babbling magpie and ominous screech-owl. And yet will we avoid this seeming injustice, we throw down all fence and bulwark of public decency and public opinion; political calumny will soon join hands with private slander; and every principle, every feeling, that binds the citizen to his country and the spirit to its Creator, will be undermined— not by reasoning, for from that there is no danger; but-by the mere habit of hearing them reviled and scoffed at with impunity. Were we to contemplate the evils of a rank and unweeded press only in its effect on the manners of a people, and on the general tone of thought and conversation, the greater the love which we bore to literature and to all the means and instruments of human improvement, the greater would be the earnestness with which we should solicit the interference of law: the more anxiously should we wish for some Ithuriel spear, that might remove from the ear of the public, and expose in their own fiendish shape those reptiles, which inspiring venom and forging illusions as they list, -thence raise At least distempered, discontented thoughts, PARADISE LOST. ESSAY XII. Quomodo autem id futurum sit, ne quis incredibile arbitretur, ostendam. Imprimis multiplicabitur regnum, et summa rerum potestas per plurimos dissipata et concisa minuetur. Tunc discordia civiles in perpetuum serentur, nec ulla requies bellis exitialibus erit, donec reges decem pariter existant qui orbem terræ, non ad regendum, sed ad consumendum, partiantur. Hi exercitibus in immensum coactis, et agrorum cultibus destitutis, quod est principium eversionis et cladis, disperdent omnia, et comminuent, et vorabunt. Tum reperite adversus eos hostis potentissimus ab extremis finibus plaga septentrionalis orietur, qui tribus ex eo numero deletis qui tunc Asiam obtinebunt, assumetur in societatem a cæteris, ac princeps omnium constituetur. Hic insustentabili dominatione vexabit orbem; divina et humana miscebit; infanda dictu et execrabilia molietur: nova consilia in pectore suo volutabit, ut proprium sibi constituat imperium; leges commutabit, suas sanciet; contaminabit, diripiet, spoliabit, occidet. Denique immutato nomine, atque imperii sede translata, confusio ac perturbatio humani generis consequetur. Tum vere detestabile, atque abominandum tempus existet, quo nulli hominum sit vita jucunda. LACTANTIUS de Vitâ Beatâ, Lib. vii. c. 16. But lest this should be deemed incredible, I will show the manner in which it is to take place. First, there will be a multiplication of independent sovereignties, and the supreme magistracy of the empire, scattered and cut up into fragments, will be enfeebled in the exercise of power by law and authority. Then will be sown the seeds of civil discords, nor will there be any rest or pause to wasteful and ruinous wars; while the soldiery kept together in immense standing armies, the kings will crush and lay waste at their will;—until at length there will rise up against them a most puissant military chieftain of low birth, who will have conceded to him a fellowship with the other sovereigns of the earth, and will finally be constituted the head of all. This man will harass the civilized world with an insupportable despotism, he will confound and commix all things spiritual and temporal. He will form plans and preparations of the most execrable and sacrilegious nature. He will be forever restlessly turning over new schemes in his imagination, in order that he may fix the imperial power over all in his own name and possession. He will change the former laws, he will sanction a code of his own, he will contaminate, pillage, lay waste and massacre. At length, when he has succeeded in the change of names and titles, and in the transfer of the seat of empire, there will follow a confusion and perturbation of the human race; then will there be for a while an era of horror and abomination, during which no man will enjoy his life in quietness.* I INTERPOSE this essay as an historical comment on the words mimic and caricaturist of Charlemagne," as applied to the despot, whom since the time that the words were first printed, we have, thank Heaven! succeeded in encaging. The motto contains one of the most striking instances of an uninspired prophecy fulfilled even in many of its minutiæ, that I recollect ever to have met with and it is hoped, that as a curiosity it will reconcile my readers to its unusual length. But though my chief motive was that of relieving, by the variety of an historical parallel, the series of argument on this most important of all subjects, the communicability of truth, yet the essay is far from being a digression. Having given utterance to quicquid in rem tam maleficam indignatio dolorque dictarent, concerning the mischiefs of a lawless press, I held it an act of justice to give a portrait no less lively of the excess to which the remorseless ambition of a government might go in accumulating its oppressions in the one instance before the discovery of printing, and in the other during the suppression of its freedom. I have translated the following from a voluminous German work, Michael Ignaz Schmidt's History of the Germans, from Charles the Great to Conrade I.; in which this extract forms the conclusion of the second chapter of the third book. The late tyrant's close imitation of Charlemagne was sufficiently evidenced by his assumption of the iron crown of Italy, by his imperial coronation with the presence and authority of the Holy Father; by his imperial robe embroidered with bees in order to mark him as a successor of Pepin, and even by his ostentatious revocation of Charlemagne's grants to the Bishop of Rome. But that the differences might be felt likewise, I have prefaced the translation with the few following observations. * This translation has expressions referring to some words inserted by the author in the Latin quotation in the previous editions.—Ed. D* |