For this vigilance, and indeed for almost all that keeps up in us, permanently and effectually, the spirit of regard to liberty and the public good, we must look to the unshackled and independent energies of the press. In the reign of William III., and through the influence of the popular principle in our constitution, this finally became free. The licensing act, suffered to expire in 1679, was revived in 1685 for seven years. In 1692, it was continued till the end of the session of 1693. Several attempts were afterwards made to renew its operation, which the less courtly whigs combined with the tories and jacobites to defeat.[253] Both parties indeed employed the press with great diligence in this reign; but while one degenerated into malignant calumny and misrepresentation, the signal victory of liberal principles is manifestly due to the boldness and eloquence with which they were promulgated. Even during the existence of a censorship, a host of unlicensed publications, by the negligence or connivance of the officers employed to seize them, bore witness to the inefficacy of its restrictions. The bitterest invectives of jacobitism were circulated in the first four years after the revolution.[254] _Liberty of the press._--The liberty of the press consists, in a strict sense, merely in an exemption from the superintendence of a licenser. But it cannot be said to exist in any security, or sufficiently for its principal ends, where discussions of a political or religious nature, whether general or particular, are restrained by too narrow and severe limitations. The law of libel has always been indefinite; an evil probably beyond any complete remedy, but which evidently renders the liberty of free discussion rather more precarious in its exercise than might be wished. It appears to have been the received doctrine in Westminster Hall before the revolution, that no man might publish a writing reflecting on the government, nor upon the character, or even capacity and fitness, of any one employed in it. Nothing having passed to change the law, the law remained as before. Hence in the case of Tutchin, it is laid down by Holt, that to possess the people with an ill opinion of the government, that is, of the ministry, is a libel. And the attorney-general, in his speech for the prosecution, urges that there can be no reflection on those that are in office under her majesty, but it must cast some reflection on the queen who employs them. Yet in this case the censure upon the administration, in the passages selected for prosecution, was merely general, and without reference to any person, upon which the counsel for Tutchin vainly relied.[255]