o adopt, without any other
interference. It is his Areopagitica, in which he contends for
unlicensed printing--an oration addressed from his closet to the
Parliament of England, and which has been cited by Lord Mansfield
himself, on the bench. His words are--"Nor is it to the common people
less than a reproach; for if we be so jealous of them that we cannot
trust them with an English pamphlet, what do we but censure them for a
giddy, vicious and ungrounded people? That this is care or love of them
we cannot pretend."

Such are the sentiments of Milton, in that noble effort of united
argument and eloquence, which I should not fear to hold up against the
most splendid orations of antiquity.

Having thus, I submit, made good my position, that political papers,
whatever their description, can produce no mischief, and that there is no
need to prosecute them; I will now show you, that not only can
publications, containing false opinions, do no mischief, but that they
actually produce benefit, and that therefore not they, but the
prosecutions, which would check, and stifle them are injurious. Is it
meant to be contended that error is stronger than truth; folly more
powerful than reason, and irreligion than religion? No man, in his
senses, will maintain such propositions. On the contrary, error has
always been dispersed before reason, and infidelity by religion. The
appearance of error and falsehood has always roused Truth to rise to the
work of refutation. Even the sublime truths of religion have never been
so completely demonstrated, and conviction and faith have never been so
firmly fixed in the minds of men as by those books of controversy which
have been drawn forth by attacks upon Christianity; and which, but for
the publications denying the authenticity of the religion, would never
have been in existence; but, invaluable as they are, the world must have
wanted them. As to political writings, is it not notorious, that the
very best expositions of the nature of civil society and government, are
solely to be ascribed to the conflicts of reason with the false and
loathsome doctrines of passive obedience and divine indefeasible right,
which found their way into the world by the freedom of publication? Even
that great work, the treatise of Locke on Government, itself, which is
justly regarded as the political Bible (I mean no irreverence) of
Englishmen, would never have seen the light, but that it was written to
re