his life; a speech that is, curiously enough, a continuation historically and legally of the great speech made by Andrew Hamilton in 1735 at the trial of John Peter Zenger. By Chancellor Kent it was declared to be Hamilton's "greatest forensic effort" and the ardor with which he threw himself into the cause is said to have made his pleading a memorable event. It was his last important speech and one cannot fail to mark that he, the genius who owed to journalism his education and his opportunity, ended his long record of service to humanity as he made his greatest legal effort for the freedom and protection of the press.
In declaring Croswell guilty the judge had ruled, as had Judge De Lancey in the Zenger case, that the truth of the libel could not be offered in evidence. It will be remembered that the venerable Andrew Hamilton had, in the face of all precedent, shattered this stand, at least so far as the jury was concerned.
Hamilton's Croswell speech itself has been lost,[1] but in his preparatory notes he emphasizes, as only he could emphasize, those principles the development of which in this country we have been tracing from the time of Benjamin Harris in 1690.
The outgrown dictum, "the greater the truth the greater the libel," was bad in morals and bad in law, he contended. "The liberty of the press," his notes read, "consists in the right to publish with impunity truth with good motives for justifiable ends, though reflecting on the Government, Magistracy or individuals."
The allowance of this right, he argued, was essential to the preservation of free government, the disallowance of it, fatal.[2]
