released on bail ten days afterwards.[392] But, without minutely considering the questionable instances of privilege that we may regret to find, I will select one wherein the House of Commons appear to have gone far beyond either the reasonable or customary limits of privilege, and that with very little pretext of public necessity. In the reign of George I., a newspaper called _Mist's Journal_ was notorious as the organ of the jacobite faction. A passage full of the most impudent longings for the Pretender's restoration having been laid before the house, it was resolved, May 28, 1721, "that the said paper is a false, malicious, scandalous, infamous, and traitorous libel, tending to alienate the affections of his majesty's subjects, and to excite the people to sedition and rebellion, with an intention to subvert the present happy establishment, and to introduce popery and arbitrary power." They went on after this resolution to commit the printer Mist to Newgate, and to address the king that the authors and publishers of the libel might be prosecuted.[393] It is to be observed that no violation of privilege either was, or indeed could be alleged as the ground of this commitment; which seems to imply that the house conceived itself to be invested with a general power, at least in all political misdemeanours. I have not observed any case more recent than this of Mist, wherein any one has been committed on a charge which could not possibly be interpreted on a contempt of the house, or a breach of its privilege. It became however the practice, without previously addressing the king, to direct a prosecution by the attorney-general for offences of a public nature, which the Commons had learned in the course of any inquiry, or which had been formally laid before them.[394] This seems to have been introduced about the beginning of the reign of Anne, and is undoubtedly a far more constitutional course than that of arbitrary punishment by overstraining their privilege. In some instances, libels have been publicly burned by the order of one or other house of parliament.