nced him to _transportation for seven
years_. The sentence was executed with rigorous harshness.[136]

[Footnote 136: 23 St. Tr. 237; Belsham's History of George III.]

(9.) The same year Thomas Muir, Esq., was brought to trial for
Leasing-making or public Libel at Edinburgh. He was a promising young
lawyer, with liberal tendencies in politics, desiring the education of
the great mass of the people and a reform in Parliament. He was a
member of various Reform societies, and sometimes spoke at their
meetings in a moderate tone recommending only legal efforts--by
discussion and petition--to remedy the public grievances. His Honor
(Mr. Curtis) who belongs to a family so notoriously "democratic" in
the beginning of this century, and so eager in its denunciations of
the Federalists of that period, knows that the law even of
England--which they so much hated--allows all that. It appeared that
Mr. Muir also lent a copy of Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" to a
mechanic who asked the loan as a favor. For these offences he was
indicted for sedition, charged with instituting "a Society for
Reform," and with an endeavor "to represent the government of this
country as oppressive and tyrannical, and the legislative body as
venal and corrupt." It was alleged in the indictment that he
complained of the government of England as "costly," the monarchy as
"useless, cumbersome, and expensive," that he advised persons to read
Paine's Rights of Man, and circulated copies of a periodical called
"the _Patriot_," which complained of the grievances of the people. On
trial he was treated with great insolence and harshness, reprimanded,
interrupted, and insulted by the agents of the government--the court.
An association of men had offered a reward of five guineas for the
discovery of any person who circulated the writings of Thomas Paine.
Five of the fifteen jurors were members of that association,--and in
Scotland a bare majority of the jurors convicts. Mr. Muir defended
himself, and that ably. Lord Justice Clark charged his packed jury:--

"There are two things which you should attend to, which
require no proof. The first is that the British Constitution
is the _best in the world_!" "Is not every man _secure in
his life, liberty, and property? Is not happiness in the
power of every man?_ 'Does not every man sit safely under
his own vine and fig-tree' and none shall make him afraid?"
"The other circumstance ...