Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/211

Rh instructions to indict some one. Abijah was sentenced to thirty days in jail, whereupon the paper scoffingly announced that, although the bookkeeper was in jail and the editor on his back, the cause of liberty would still be upheld.

Another victim of the displeasure of the administration was Matthew Lyon, by some described as the "Wild Irishman," by others regarded as one of the sturdiest of American patriots. He was in the army that captured Burgoyne, and when peace was restored set up a sawmill, a paper-mill and a printing press near the foot of Lake Champlain, and in 1793, published a small newspaper which he at first called The Farmers' Library and later changed to the Fairhaven Gazette. He was elected to Congress, and distinguished himself in the House of Representatives by declining to march to the President's house to make the usual formal call of respect.

Lyon was one of the first of those brought to trial under the Sedition law. He had addressed a letter to the editor of the Vermont Journal in reply to an attack on his own course in Congress, and it was this letter that led to his indictment. The principal count was founded on the following passage, which reads very mildly to a later generation:

"As to the Executive, when I shall see the efforts of that power bent on the promotion of the comfort, the happiness, and the accommodation of the people, that Executive shall have my zealous and uniform support. But whenever I shall, on the part of the Executive, see every consideration of public welfare swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, or selfish avarice; when I shall behold men of real merit daily turned out of office, for no other cause but independency of spirit; when