Having left orders at Geneva to forward all our letters of a certain date to Manheim, and to direct those which should come afterwards, to Frankfort on the Maine, I had the good fortune to receive yours last night. I feel as much indignation as you possibly can, against those who endeavour to hurt the peace of families by malignant publications, and I enter fully into Lord ——’s on so unmerited an attack. Yet I should be heartily sorry to see these evils remedied by any restriction on the freedom of the press; because I am every day more and more convinced that its unrestrained productions, the licentious news-papers themselves not excepted, have conveyed to every corner of Great Britain, along with much impertinence and scurrility, such a regard for the constitution, such a sense of the rights of the subject, and such a degree of general knowledge, as never were so universally diffused over any other nation. Such a law as your friend proposes might, no doubt, protect individuals from unjust attacks in print: but it would at the same time remove one great means of clearing their innocence, and making known their wrongs, when injured in a more essential manner. It would limit the right which every Briton has of publicly addressing his countrymen, when he finds himself injured or oppressed by the perversion of law, or the insolence of office. Examples might be given of men of great integrity being attacked in the most cruel and ungenerous manner by people high in office and guarded by power. Such men had no other means of redress than that of appealing to the candour and good sense of the public, which they used with success. Every man’s observation may suggest to him many kinds of injustice and oppression which the rich, the insidious, or the powerful, can commit in spite of law, or perhaps by the aid of law, against the poor, the unsuspecting, and the friendless.—Many, who can silence conscience and evade law, tremble at the thoughts of their injustice being published; and nothing is, nothing can be, a greater check to the wantonness of power, than the privilege of unfolding private grievances at the bar of the public. For thus the cause of individuals is made a public concern, and the general indignation which their wrongs excite, forms at once one of the severest punishments which can be inflicted on the oppressor, and one of the strongest bulwarks that can be raised in defence of the unprotected.