ever
discountenanced the opinion that he was its author. The passage is
this:--

"One of the greatest blessings we enjoy, one of the greatest blessings
a people, my Lords, can enjoy, is liberty; but every good in this life
has its alloy of evil; licentiousness is the alloy of liberty; it is
an ebullition, an excrescence--it is a speck upon the eye of the
political body: but which I can never touch but with a gentle, with a
trembling hand, lest I destroy the body, lest I injure the eye upon
which it is apt to appear.

"There is such a connection between licentiousness and liberty, that
it is not easy to correct the one, without dangerously wounding the
other: it is extremely hard to distinguish the true limit between
them: like a changeable silk, we can easily see there are two
different colours, but we cannot easily discover where the one ends,
or where the other begins."

Mr. GURNEY.--You should state, in fairness and candour, that that was an
argument against licensing.

Mr. COOPER.--I know it was. The argument contends for the difficulty,
next to impossibility, of distinguishing where that which is allowable
ends, and that which is licentious begins. A licenser could not tell
where to allow, and where to object, yet a licenser, gentlemen, would
have had just the same means of judging that you possess; and if he could
not tell with distinctness and certainty what to let pass and what to
stop, how, with no greater power, and means of judgment, can you? With
what justice, then, can it be objected to me, that I have shown any want
of candour in not stating the precise question on which the argument was
delivered, when in the principle there is not a shadow of difference? My
application of the passage is therefore perfectly just.

Gentlemen, I have only one more quotation to trouble you with before I
conclude. That is the opinion of Lord Loughborough, afterwards
Chancellor of England. I do not know in what case, or on what occasion
it was delivered, but I believe in a judgment on a case of libel. "Every
man (says that judge) may publish at his discretion, his opinions
concerning forms and systems of government. _If they be weak and
absurd_, _they will be laughed at and forgotten_; _and_, _if they be_
bona fide, _they cannot be criminal_, _however erroneous_."

This is the opinion of a great judge upon political publications, sitting
under the authority of the king him