The right of free discussion, so essential to the maintenance of political and religious liberty, gained some additional protection in 1791, when Fox's Libel Act was passed. Prior to that date juries had been confined in libel cases to answering two questions: was the document published? and what did its words mean? The judge then decided whether the meaning put upon the words by the jury constituted a libel or not. This system gave a great advantage to the Government in all cases of seditious or blasphemous libel, and prosecutions of printers and journalists were very common. The judge was a lawyer, and probably Tory in his opinions. He was connected with Government, with the propertied classes, and with the Established Church. Any attack on existing political, proprietary, or religious institutions was therefore tested by a man who was probably prejudiced in favour of all three, and might actually have defended in the House of Lords the policy which had been attacked by the prisoner at the bar. Judges like Lord Mansfield and Lord Camden had shown themselves, during the Wilkes controversy, to be honourable and upright. But the danger existed, and even if the judge's power was not consciously abused, it was always {93} liable to be affected by class prejudice.[98] Fox's Libel Act gave to the jury the right to decide whether a publication was libellous or not. After the outbreak of the French Revolution, when the middle classes showed themselves as bigoted as the upper, even trial by jury was but a poor protection to an avowed Republican or atheist. But the new principle was safer than the old, and it was something even to have asserted that a man's political opinions should be judged by his fellow-subjects, and not by a member of the governing class. The Act implied, in the minds of those who voted for it, a reversal of the old conception of State and subject. So long as the supremacy of the State was assumed, criticism of government was inevitably regarded as improper. It was, in effect, the servant rebuking the master. On the other hand, when the right of the subject to control the State becomes the basis of political reasoning, criticism of government is no more than the master rebuking the servant. The passing of Fox's Libel Act is a proof that political minds were in a state of transition, and suggests, no less than Pitt's proposals for reform, that but for the French Revolution political estimates might have been revised, and political institutions readjusted, at a much earlier date than they were.