I have never yet got any answer to this question: “What is freedom of the press?” I want an answer to this question from some one of those, who talk of the “licentiousness of the press.” It does not consist in publishing books upon planting, farriery, or fox-hunting. There is not a despot upon earth, who attempts to prevent such publications. In short, it is farcical to talk about freedom of the press, unless by it we mean the right, the acknowledged legal right, of freely expressing our opinions, be they what they may, respecting the character and conduct of men in power; and of stating any thing, no matter what, if we can prove the truth of the statement.
In this sense the freedom of the press is a great “blessing.” In this sense it is “a terror to evil-doers, and a reward to those who do well;” but, if the freedom of the press means, that we are not to assail men in power; that they are to be as sacred from the quill as women are from the sword; while, on the other hand, the press is to praise them as much as it pleases; then, the “freedom of the press” is the greatest curse that ever fell upon a nation. It is in the character and conduct of men in power that the public are interested. These are the very matters, upon which they want, and ought to receive information. The babble of the day is of no public utility. The particulars of who walks or rides out with the King; of where and when the Duke of York salutes his royal parents; of the breakfasts and dances of Frogmore; of Generals Cartwright and Fitzroy’s going to chapel and hearing a sermon; of the cabinet and other grand dinners: these may amuse some few gossipping people; but of what use are they to the nation? Of full as little use are dissertations containing merely general principles, without a direct application of them to men and things of the present day.
But, we are sometimes told, that we may discuss the characters and measures of men in power, taking care not to hurt their feelings; that is to say, taking care never to blame either the men or the measures; for, if blamed, it follows of course, that their feelings must be hurt. We have been talked to a great deal about decency in these discussions; and we are now told, that we, of this day, are abusive; indeed, censure, or even disapprobation, however expressed, is now-a-day always called abuse. We are charged, too, with being foul-mouthed; coarse; personal; and are accused of surpassing in libellousness the writers of all former times. These assertions have been often made; but now, at a moment when there are so many persons under government prosecution for libels; now, when all the venal writers seem to have formed a conspiracy against the character, and, perhaps, the lives of those prosecuted persons, by exciting in the mind of those who are to be their jurors, a prejudice against them; now it is absolutely necessary to inquire into the truth of such assertions.
The writers of former times; times when not a thousandth part of the present corruptions prevailed; the writers (from some of whose works I am forming a collection to be published hereafter) who, in those times of comparative purity, surpassed in boldness, the writers of the present day; the bare names of those writers would fill a volume. I will, however, content myself with some extracts from Pope, who was one of the greatest scholars, the most acute reasoners, the most independent and virtuous man, and, without exception, the brightest genius that England ever produced. When he wrote, in the last reign, and in the year 1738, the laws and constitution of England were as well understood as they now are, and loyalty was not less a virtue than it now is. Corruption (under the administration of Sir Robert Walpole) was only in its infancy. Now, then, let us hear how this accomplished scholar, this great genius, whose works are read with such admiration, and which make a part of the library of every man of sense who has the means of procuring books; let us hear how this all-accomplished writer expressed himself upon the subject of the then prevailing vice and corruption.
Lo; at the wheels of her triumphal car,
Old England’s Genius, rough with many a scar,
Dragg’d in the dust! his arms hang idly round,
His flag inverted trails along the ground!
Our youth, all liv’ry’d o’er with foreign gold,
Before her dance: behind her, crawl the old!
See thronging millions to the pagod run,
And offer country, parent, wife, or son!
Hear her black trumpet thro’ the land proclaim,
That not to be corrupted is the shame.
In soldier, churchman, patriot, man in pow’r,
’Tis av’rice all, ambition is no more!
See, all our nobles begging to be slaves!
See, all our fools aspiring to be knaves!
The wit of cheats, the courage of a whore,
Are what ten thousand envy and adore:
All, all look up, with reverential awe,
At crimes that ’scape, or triumph o’er the Law;
While truth, worth, wisdom, daily they decry—
Nothing is sacred now but villany.
Yet may this verse (if such a verse remain)
Show there was one who held it in disdain.
This is only one instance. In many others he named the corrupt persons. But, Pope was called a “libeller;” and, in his preface to that part of his inestimable works, from which the above extract is made, he observes, that “there is not in the world a greater error, than that which fools are so apt to fall into, and knaves with good reason to encourage, the mistaking a satirist for a libeller.” He says, that the clamour raised on some of his former writings, induced him to bring before the public the writings of Horace and Dr. Donne. With a similar view I now appeal to him, who exceeded them both in genius, and yielded to neither in any estimable quality. Having shown the public with what freedom those authors wrote, he next gives us his own sentiments upon what was, by the venal tribe of his day, called libellous, gross, coarse, filthy, brutal, personal and seditious; and one cannot help being struck with the exact similarity in the clamours of that day and the clamours of this; though, indeed, there is nothing wonderful in it, seeing that profligacy and corruption, being always the same in nature, must always have the same antipathies, as surely as vipers of the present day inherit the fears as well as the poison of their progenitors of a century ago.
Here, in the following extracts, we have all the old grounds of clamour, together with the refutation and exposure. I beseech the public to abstract themselves from the poetry and the wit, and fix their attention wholly upon the reasoning. In it they will find an answer to all the cavilling and clamouring now in use by the conspirators against the real freedom of the press; and, I trust, they will join with me in sentiments of profound gratitude to the memory of the matchless