Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/156

 1 46 Reviews of Books published elsewhere, and at a later date of criminal prosecutions for libellous publications. The author tells us in his preface that it was his original intention to investigate the restrictions imposed upon the freedom of the press in the British American colonies, but the magnitude of the task involved in the examination of unpublished manuscript archives led to a decision to limit the investigation to Massachusetts. A mere glance at the pages of this work together with a cursory examina- tion of the foot-notes therein would disclose the fact that the research was based upon material drawn from sources available only to one whose presence in Massachusetts must have been prolonged sufficiently for him to become familiar with the places of deposit of the archives, of the court records and of the files of the provincial newspapers. The title- page describes Mr. Duniway as a Californian professor, but the preface makes clear that this admirable research was prosecuted while the author was at Cambridge. It is evident that to examine the files of newspapers referred to, required that he should visit Boston, Worcester and New York, and repeated references in text and notes show that, in addition to an exhaustive examination of the published records of the colony, he carefully perused the manuscript records of the General Court in the days of the province and instigated a search in the bewildering chaos of the Massachusetts archives. Moreover, it is evident that the writer pressed his investigation still farther and caused a fruitful search to be made of the files and records of the Superior Court of Judicature at the Suffolk Court House and of the unpublished instructions to the royal governors, copies of which have been procured by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts for publication. The development of the subject required that the contemporaneous state of opinion in England should be brought out and that the causes for the difference of progress on the two sides of the Atlantic should be explained. At the outset, in Massachusetts, it is for a while the right of " freedom of discussion " which comes under the author's considera- tion, a right which comprehends " freedom of speech, freedom of as- sembly and freedom of the press" (p. 2). The people who undertook the settlement of Massachusetts did not, he says (p. 16), conceive that there was any legal right of discussion. Therefore dissenters from the ecclesiastical policy of the colony were expelled by Endicott and at a later date Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were banished. The outcome of all this was " the banishment of the spirit of free inquiry " (p. 21). The first formal act for restrictive censorship of the press in Massa- chusetts was passed in October 1662 (p. 41). An unsuccessful effort was made in 1649 to secure the passage of a similar act (p. 25), but although a number of incidents occurred between 1641 and 1662 involv- ing the circulation of printed matter and touching upon other forms of public agitation, their only effect was to show the tendency of Massa- chusetts to place restrictions on the freedom of discussion. The attempt