Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/67

Rh hope that the General Assembly "will find some eflfectual remedy to revive the dying credit of the Province and restore to us our former happy circumstances." For this implied criticism he was haled before the Provincial Council, where his defense was that the paragraph had been written and inserted without his knowledge by a journeyman.

In 1 72 1 Andrew Bradford eliminated the name of his former partner, John Cobson, and from that time on the imprint read "Philadelphia: printed and sold by Andrew Bradford at the Bible in Second Street and also by William Bradford in New York where advertisements are taken in," the fact of the same paper being sold in New York and Philadelphia tending to broaden the views and the outlook of the citizens of both cities.

It is interesting to note Bradford's "editorials," as showing that the editors, even in those early days when there were but three or four of them and they were far apart, were watching each other; and that while James Franklin was having his trouble with the Colonial Government in New England, Andrew Bradford, whom Benjamin Franklin calls illiterate, was defending the New England Courant and its publishers.

"My Lord Coke observes," commented Bradford, in the first newspaper defense of a free press, "that to punish first, and then inquire, the law abhors; but here Mr. Franklin has a severe sentence passed upon him, even to the taking away of his livelihood, without being called to make an answer. An indifferent person would judge by this vote against courts, that the Assembly of Massachusetts Bay is made up of oppressors and bigots, who make religion the only engine of destruction to the people, and the rather because the first letter in the Courant, of the 14th of January, which the assembly censures, so nat-