For Henry Fielding's insight was far too profound for him to fail to strike at the root of individual crime, in those conditions which bred the criminal as surely as, to use his own favourite simile, unclean surroundings breed disease. And he had not been six months on the Bench before finding his first opportunity in a _Charge_ delivered, as their Chairman, to the Westminster Grand Jury, on June 29, 1749. [10] This "very loyal, learned, ingenious, excellent and useful" Charge was published "By Order of the Court, and at the unanimous Request of the Gentlemen of the Grand Jury"; and it is, Mr Austin Dobson tells us, "still regarded by lawyers as a model exposition." It is also a stirring appeal to the worthy jurors to discharge their duties as befitted men called upon to exercise one of the most ancient and honourable of English liberties: "Grand Juries, Gentlemen," declared their new Chairman, "are in Reality the only Censors of this Nation. As such, the Manners of the People are in your Hands, and in yours only. You, therefore, are the only Correctors of them.... To execute this Duty with Vigilance, you are obliged by the Duty you owe both to God and to your Country." Here is the same zeal, now directed to stimulating the conscience of the Westminster Jurors, which moved _Captain Vinegar_ to lay about him so lustily on all the abuses within reach of his newspaper, and which inspired the 'father of the English Novel' with the admitted motive,--"I declare, that to recommend Goodness and Innocence hath been my sincere Endeavour in this History"--if not with the consummate art of his pages.