216 1774 SLANDER AND LIBEL Ch. 18. House, and by no less a person than the most rising statesman and orator of the day, Charles Fox. Yet the concluding words of the article were undoubtedly true; and a more signal example of their truth could hardly have been cited, than the very man who asked the House to pronounce it a false and scandalous libel. But in this instance, instead of taking the law into their own hands, the House directed the Attorney-General to prosecute; and the result was, that the two Woodfalls, the respectable publishers of the Public Advertiser and the Morning Chronicle, the principal London journals, were convicted before Lord Mansfield, sentenced each to a fine of two hundred pounds, and imprisonment for three months. Prevalence of This was an age of libel and slander; yet it would be unjust to represent the Press as peculiarly licentious, or as the only organ through which the prevalent spirit of defamation and falsehood found a vent. The Houses of Parliament, Public Assemblies, the Arts, the Drama, nay, even the Pulpit, contributed to swell the flood of slander which inundated society. It was but the other day that the House of Commons had dIf we look into morality, our governors, since that period (the Revolution), by their wicked examples of bribery, corruption, dissipation, gaming, and every species of wickedness that can be committed, have so debauched the morals of the people, that morality is in the same deplorable condition as liberty, property, and religion, viz., almost vanished from these once happy isles.' OF COMMON OCCURRENCE. 1774 217 inadvertently thanked their own chaplain for a Ch. 18. sermon quite as virulent as the libel for which the printers of a newspaper were now visited with fine and imprisonment. The license of parliamentary debate had no doubt been excessive from the era of the Revolution. The names of Walpole, Wyndham, Yonge, Pulteney, Pitt, are associated with records of parliamentary conflicts, which for vehemence and ferocity have not been equalled, perhaps, by those of a later period. We are assured, indeed, that the great administration of Walpole, sustained as it was by the vigour and fortitude of its chief, by the support of the Crown, and favoured by the best part, if not by the majority of the nation, sunk at last overwhelmed by the torrent of invective with which it was assailed. The rigor, however, with which the Standing Orders interdictory of publication were enforced, rendered the parliamentary eloquence of those days less known to contemporaries than they are to the present generation. But when the publication of the debates became tolerated by connivance, and at length in 1774, after the short but sharp struggle lately recorded, openly recognized, the proceedings of Parliament, more especially of the House Commons, have been a subject of daily and eager interest to the people. Thus the people became, in a sense, parties to the debates of the Legislature, which, consequently, acquired an influence and importance hardly to be appreciated in 218 Ch. 18. 1774 VIRULENT CHARACTER OF later days, when a powerful and intelligent Press has at least divided the empire of Public Opinion with the Senate. What, then, was the example set by that great Assembly, the Representative of the People, which comprised men elevated above their fellows by every form of distinctionillustrious birth, vast opulence, civil wisdom and moving eloquence? The men who took a foremost part, seemed to be intent on disparaging each other, and proving that neither possessed any qualification of wisdom, knowledge, or public virtue. The language with which the administration of Lord North was nightly attacked in the House of Commons, would have been exaggerated if applied to the worst Government that had existed in ancient or modern times; and the epithets of reproach lavished personally on the Minister, were applicable only to the vilest and most contemptible of mankind. The terms of insult were sometimes, indeed, so gross and extravagant, that they rebounded from the victim, and recoiled upon those by whom they had been hurled. Charles Fox, who entered on public life as the follower, and who subsequently became the colleague, of Lord North, took the lead in this disgraceful warfare. Not on one or two occasions only, but continuously, night after night, for a series of years, the rising hope and head of the Whig party denounced his former chief and future ally as the greatest criminal in the country, PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES. called for his blood, spoke of him as a villain with whom it would be unsafe to be alone; and up to the eve of the coalition, desired to be branded as infamous if he ever formed a political connection with that Minister. Barré, who had passed from the practice of gross insult to equally gross adulation of Pitt, was also conspicuous in parliamentary defamation. But amidst numerous slanderers, whom to name would only be to redeem from the obscurity into which they have sunk, it is painful to record that Burke was among the foremost in this ignoble strife. The years, the philosophy, the decorum which governed his private life, could not restrain this great man from plunging into the excess of party violence, and from using weapons which the most impetuous and profligate of his coadjutors forbore to touch. It was not enough for Burke to assail in unmeasured terms the public character and policy of the Minister, but he must hold up the bodily defects and infirmities of the man-not, indeed, to the ridicule, for with all its faults the prevailing temper of the Assembly has ever been that of gentlemen-but to the disgust of the House of Commons. 219 Ch. 18. 1774 in Parliament. This practice of evil speaking was at its height Evil speaking during the American war; but its prevalence at all times, formed one of the most prominent of the reasons which were urged against the publication of the debates. Rigby, and other members of long parliamentary experience, maintained that a daily report of what was said in the House of 220 1774 PARLIAMENTARY VIRULENCE. Ch. 18. Commons, could not fail to lower it in the estimation of the public, and thus bring the system of representative government into discredit. But public censure was a certain remedy for the abuses and irregularities of debate. The great Council of the nation could not long endure the derision and contempt which attend the vulgar squabbles of a vestry. The orator who might venture to indulge his party heat in the presence of some hundred or two of his equals, will soon be taught circumspection when his words are circulated through the land, and criticized by thousands of readers, little subject, perhaps, to the passions of party, and wholly free from the excitement of debate. Accordingly, since the admission of reporters for the public journals, a marked change for the better has taken place in the proceedings of Parliament. Personal invective, which, up to that time, had been the chief weapon of debate, was more sparingly resorted to, and is, at length, almost wholly disused in parliamentary Immorality of the Stage. warfare. The STAGE, at this period, was either a school of immorality, or a vehicle of slander. The most popular plays and farces, if they were not founded on the scandal of the day, contained pointed allusions to the gossip of political and fashionable society, and persons conspicuous in either. Foote, the most successful dramatist and accomplished actor of that time, sought reputation and fortune |