every species of writing and speaking criminal, tending to
obstruct the avarice or ambition of the power which legislates, or which can influence legislation. Thus governments make of calumny a spunge, to expunge their own
crimes. They affect to take the side of truth to hide falsehood, as they do the side of religion, to hide the frauds of
hierarchy. An attempt to aid by penalties the cause of religion and truth, is a proclamation of imposture. These
champions have ever found them their enemies. The penalties which extorted Galileo's renunciation of his discoveries, attempted to fix and flatten this earth for truth's sake.
Laws for regulating truth and religion, like Sampson's hair,
strengthen as they grow; and governments not being blind,
are at length enabled by them to pull down the fabricks,
election and militia; and instead of being buried in their
ruins, to convert them into castles for oppression.
Suppose such laws should make it criminal to calumniate some officers and not others; will not those unprotected by the law, be more responsible to publick opinion, than those it covers? Will not election operate more forcibly as to those whose qualities it can sift by free discussion, than as to those whose qualities cannot be canvassed with equal safety? It might be made as dangerous to speak irreverently of a president's posteriors, as it was of old to look upon the Ægis of Minerva.[1] Every one can correctly estimate the value of a right of discussion, free in relation to a constable, but restricted in relation to a president.
The pleasure of the government may leave those officers exposed to free discussion, or amenable to the sovereignty of the people, who can do no mischief; and cover those against it, who can overturn our policy. This pleasure may allow this sovereignty, more freedom of discussion as to the same officers in one year than in another, in imitation of the suspensions of the habeas corpus act in
- ↑ The case of Baldwin in New Jersey, here alluded to, ought to be preserved as a monument, to remind the United States, of the short work of sedition laws, in destroying the freedom of speech.
