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 The Judicial History of Individual Liberty, any seditious intent; the act itself was suf ficient. When, in 1680, the Licensing act had been suffered temporarily to expire, an obsequious bench hastened to formulate the doctrine that it was criminal, independently of statute,

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Justice Scroggs. ''There is lately found out by an experienced physician," it read, "an in comparable medicine" [gold]. "It will make justice deaf as well as blind," and it "stifles a plot as certainly as the itch is destroyed by butter and brimstone." Scroggs himself pre-

ALGEKNON SIDNEY.

to publish any public news, whether true or false, without the king's license. Carr's case, 7 St. Tr. 1114; Harris' case, (ib. 927). Carr was prosecuted for the publication of a paper called the Weekly Packet of Advice from Rome, in the course of which the writer unmistakably imputed corruption to Chief

sided at the trial. Carr was defended by Sir Francis Wilmington, who admitted that he was "upon a tender point," but suggested that an indiscreet act is not necessarily malicious; that is, Carr was only repeating the prevailing rumors of Scrogg's corrup tion. In his charge to the jury Scroggs as