Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 16.pdf/785

 720

speech. The jury immediately returned a verdict of not guilty, and this vicious at tempt to distort a political criticism into a personal libel was frustrated. The contemporaneous prosecutions of Cobbett, Hunt and Drakard arose out of criticisms of the barbarous severity of the military punishments- of the time, and the employment of German troops in suppres sing outbreaks among native soldiers. In June, 1809, there was a mutiny among the soldiers at Ely, for which five of the ring leaders, under a guard of the German legion, received five hundred lashes each by way of punishment. Cobbett seized the ocsion to inveigh against foreign mercenaries and military flopging: he contrasted the barbarities of English military discipline with that by which Napoleon maintained his armies. For this article in the Political Register he was convicted of a libel on the German legion, sentenced to two years' im prisonment, and fined one thousand pounds, (31 St. Tr. 820). The printer of his paper and two persons who had sold it were also punished. Attorney-General Gibb's speech in prose cution of Cobbett was made the subject of a savage attack by John and Leigh Hunt in the Examiner. A long series of instances of barbarous military punishments were col lected from various sources, and com mented upon in violent language. The Hunts were immediately brought to trial before Lord Ellenborough (31 St. Tr. 367). They were ably and energetically defended by Brougham, who rested the defense upon the intention of the writers. "If that," he claimed, "has apparently been good, or whether laudable or not, it has been inno cent—if it has been innocent and not blame worthy—then whatever you may think of the opinion, you must acquit those who pub lished it." To show the innocency of their intentions, without defending their lan guage, Brougham read the published opin

ions of military men of high repute—Stew art and Abercrombie among others— against the prevailing system of life service and the barbarity of the lash as a punish ment. He showed that almost every gen eral officer of the army had expressed aver sion to corporal punishment. If such au thorities,- he argued, could advance these opinions without its being imputed to them that their object was to disgust the English soldier with his service and sow dissention in the ranks, why should the same right be denied to the defendants? Lord Ellenborough, in lib charge to the jury, said there was a plain distinction between such a fair and honest discussion by men capable of giving an opinion, and such an article as the one in question, the mere form of which, to sa nothing of the language used, exc'.uded it from such a comparison. Though Ellenborough told the jury that in his opin ion the article had been published with the intention imputed by the information, they acquitted both defendants. A country editor named Drakard. who had reprinted the article from the Examiner, with some additions of his own, was not so fortunate. On his trial before Baron Wood, at Lincoln, Brougham again defended with ihe same arguments that he had used in the former case: but Drakard was found guilty. In the Hunts' case Lord Ellenborough had conceded "it is competent for all the subjects of his majesty freely but temperately to discuss through the medium of the press every question connected with public policy.'' But in Drakard's case Baron Wood maintained a different doctrine. "It is said that we havt a right to discuss the acts of cur legislature. This would be a large per mission indeed. Is there, gentleman, to be a power in the people to counteract the acts of the Parliament? And is the libeller to come and make the people dissatisfied with the government under which he lives? This