they can not impeach the rectitude of the parallel, for the present, may yet render it probable, that as the same constitution of government has been built up in France with incomparably greater rapidity, so it may have an incomparably shorter duration. We are not conscious of any feelings of bitterness towards the First Consul; or, if any, only that venial prejudice, which naturally results from the having hoped proudly of an individual, and the having been miserably disappointed. But we will not voluntarily cease to think freely and speak openly. We owe grateful hearts, and uplifted hands of thanksgiving to the Divine Providence, that there is yet one European country-and that country our own-in which the actions of public men may be boldly analyzed, and the result publicly stated. And let the Chief Consul, who professes in all things to follow his fate, learn to submit to it, if he finds that it is still his fate to struggle with the spirit of English freedom, and the virtues which are the offspring of that spirit ;—if he finds, that the genius of Great Britain, which blew up his Egyptian navy into the air, and blighted his Syrian laurels, still follows him with a calm and dreadful eye; and in peace, equally as in war, still watches for that liberty, in which alone the genius of our isle lives, and moves, and has its being; and which being lost, all our commercial and naval greatness would instantly languish, like a flower, the root of which had been silently eaten away by a worm; and without which, in any country, the public festivals, and pompous merriments of a nation present no other spectacle to the eye of reason, than a mob of maniacs dancing in their fetters.

ESSAY XIII.

Must there be still some discord mix'd among
The harmony of men, whose mood accords

Best with contention tun'd to notes of wrong?
That when war fails, peace must make war with words,
With words unto destruction arm'd more strong
Than ever were our foreign foemen's swords;
Making as deep, tho' not yet bleeding wounds?
What war left scarless, calumny confounds.

Truth lies entrapp'd where cunning finds no bar :
Since no proportion can there be betwixt
Our actions which in endless motions are,
And ordinances which are always fixt.
Ten thousand laws more can not reach so far,
But malice goes beyond, or lives commixt
So close with goodness, that it ever will
Corrupt, disguise, or counterfeit it still,

And therefore would our glorious Alfred, who
Join'd with the king's the good man's majesty,
Not leave law's labyrinth without a clue-
Gave to deep skill its just authority,-

I RECUR to the dilemma stated in the eighth essay. How shall we solve this problem? Its solution is to be found in that spirit which, like the universal menstruum sought for by the old alchemists, can blend and harmonize the most discordant elements;—it is to be found in the spirit of a rational freedom diffused and become national, in the consequent influence and control of public opinion, and in its most precious organ, the jury. It

* Daniel. Epistle to Sir Thomas Egerton. The lines in italics are substituted by the author for the original, and there are a few other verbal alterations.Ed.

is to be found, wherever juries are sufficiently enlightened to perceive the difference, and to comprehend the origin and necessity of the difference, between libels and other criminal overt-acts, and are sufficiently independent to act upon the conviction, that in a charge of libel, the degree, the circumstances, and the intention, constitute-not merely modify-the offence, give it its being, and determine its legal name. The words maliciously and advisedly, must here have a force of their own, and a proof of their own. They will consequently consider the law as a blank power provided for the punishment of the offender, not as a light by which they are to determine and discriminate the offence. The understanding and conscience of the jury are the judges in toto: the law a blank congé d'élire. The law is the clay, and those the potter's wheel. Shame fall on that man, who shall labor to confound what reason and nature have put asunder, and who at once, as far as in him lies, would render the press ineffectual and the law odious: who would lock up the main river, the Thames, of our intellectual commerce; would throw a bar across the stream, that must render its navigation dangerous or partial, using as his materials the very banks, which were intended to deepen its channel and guard against its inundations! Shame fall on him, and a participation of the infamy of those, who misled an English jury to the murder of Algernon Sidney.

But though the virtuous intention of the writer must be allowed a certain influence in facilitating his acquittal, the degree of his moral guilt is not the true index or mete-wand of his condemnation. For juries do not sit in a court of conscience, but of law; they are not the representatives of religion, but the guardians of external tranquillity. The leading principle, the pole-star, of the judgment in its decision concerning the libellous nature of a published writing, is its more or less remote connection with after overt-acts, as the cause or occasion of the same. Thus the publication of actual facts may be, and most often will be, criminal and libellous, when directed against private characters: not only because the charge will reach the minds of many who can not be competent judges of the truth or falsehood of facts to which themselves were not witnesses, against a man whom they do not know, or at best know imperfectly; but because such a publication is of itself a very serious overt-act, by which the author without authority and without trial, has inflicted punishment on a fellow

subject, himself being witness and jury, judge and executioner. Of such publications there can be no legal justification, though the wrong may be palliated by the circumstance that the injurious charges are not only true, but wholly out of the reach of the law. But in libels on the government there are two things to be balanced against each other: first, the incomparably greater mischief of the overt-acts, if we suppose them actually occasioned by the libel-(as for instance, the subversion of government and property, if the principles taught by Thomas Paine had been realized, or if even an attempt had been made to realize them, by the many thousands of his readers); and second, the very great improbability that such effects will be produced by such writings. Government concerns all generally, and no one in particular. The facts are commonly as well known to the readers, as to the writer and falsehood therefore easily detected. It is proved, likewise, by experience, that the frequency of open political discussion, with all its blamable indiscretions, indisposes a nation to overt-acts of practical sedition or conspiracy. They talk ill, said Charles V. of his Belgian provinces, but they suffer so much the better for it. His successor thought differently: he determined to be master of their words and opinions, as well as of their actions, and in consequence lost one half of those provinces, and retained the other half at an expense of strength and treasure greater than the original worth of the whole. An enlightened jury, therefore, will require proofs of more than ordinary malignity of intention, as furnished by the style, price, mode of circulation, and so forth; or of punishable indiscretion arising out of the state of the times, as of dearth, for instance, or of whatever other calamity is likely to render the lower classes turbulent, and apt to be alienated from the government of their country. For the absence of a right disposition of mind must be considered both in law and in morals, as nearly equivalent to the presence of a wrong disposition. Under such circumstances the legal paradox that a libel may be the more a libel for being true, becomes strictly just, and as such ought to be acted upon.

Concerning the right of punishing by law the authors of heretical or deistical writings, I reserve my remarks for a future essay, in which I hope to state the grounds and limits of toleration more accurately than they seem to me to have been hitherto traced. There is one maxim, however, which I am tempted to seize as it

passes across me. If I may trust my own memory, it is indeed a very old truth and yet if the fashion of acting in apparent ignorance thereof be any presumption of its novelty, it ought to be new, or at least have become so by courtesy of oblivion. It is this that as far as human practice can realize the sharp limits and exclusive proprieties of science, law and religion should be kept distinct. There is, in strictness, no proper opposition but between the two polar forces of one and the same power.* If I say then, that law and religion are natural opposites, and that the latter is the requisite counterpoise of the former, let it not be interpreted, as if I had declared them to be contraries. The law has rightfully invested the creditor with the power of arresting and imprisoning an insolvent debtor, the farmer with the power of transporting, mediately at least, the pillagers of his hedges and copses; but the law does not compel him to exercise that power, while it will often happen that religion commands him to forego it. Nay, so well was this understood by our grandfathers, that a man who squares his conscience by the law was a common paraphrase or synonyme of a wretch without any conscience at all. We have all of us learnt from history, that there was a long and dark period, during which the powers and the aims of law were usurped in the name of religion by the clergy and the courts spiritual and we all know the result. Law and

* Every power in nature and in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole means and condition of its manifestation: and all opposition is a tendency to re-union. This is the universal law of polarity or essential dualism, first promulgated by Heraclitus, 2000 years afterwards re-published, and made the foundation both of logic, of physics, and of metaphysics by Giordano Bruno. The principle may be thus expressed. The identity of thesis and antithesis is the substance of all being; their opposition the condition of all existence or being manifested; and every thing or phenomenon is the exponent of a synthesis as long as the opposite energies are retained in that synthesis. Thus water is neither oxygen nor hydrogen, nor yet is it a commixture of both; but the synthesis or indifference of the two: and as long as the copula endures, by which it becomes water, or rather which alone is water, it is not less a simple body than either of the imaginary elements, improperly called its ingredients or components. It is the object of the mechanical atomistic philosophy to confound synthesis with synartesis, or rather with mere juxtaposition of corpuscules separated by invisible interspaces. I find it difficult to determine, whether this theory contradicts the reason or the senses most: for it is alike inconceivable and unimaginable.