Page:Statement of facts relating to the trespass on the printing press in the possession of Mr. William Lyon Mackenzie, in June, 1826.djvu/17

 support any man in obtaining a living by inventing and disseminating slander.

Nevertheless, before Mr. Mackenzie could make up his mind to abandon his employment and endeavor to earn his living by honest industry, he was determined to make one or two desperate efforts, to draw the universal attention of the public upon him. Perhaps his hope was, that he should compel the Government to prosecute him, by the unexampled scurrility of his language; or, perhaps, he expected to gain a rather less degree of notoriety by enraging individuals and provoking them to a prosecution, which he, of course, would represent as persecution; or he may have meant principally to make an experiment, whether, by making his columns the vehicle of the grossest and coarsest slanders, and of the most malicious lies against the living and the dead; against men and women; the powerful and the helpless, he should not at least secure the patronage of all those whose minds and hearts were so utterly depraved, as to rejoice in this degradation of human nature, and thus draw a subsistence from some source, no matter how polluted.

Under the influence of some or all of these motives, he began in the month of May, 1826, to send into the world a series of libels, unequalled for their disgusting ribaldry, for their hardened insolence, and for their brutal and unfeeling cruelty; and these libels were directed, not merely against persons in Public situations, who had borne his slander for years with silent contempt; but against persons unknown in public life, and unconnected with politics—against married women—against aged widows, and even against our friends who had been long dead, and who, while they lived, were universally beloved and respected. Many of the foul aspersions thus published to the