It was the common people the government feared. He remarks that on the same day (May 21st) the prosecution was instituted and the royal proclamation issued--the latter being indictable as an effort to influence the verdict in a pending case. He calls attention to the "special jury," before which he was summoned. It is virtually selected by the Master of the Crown Office, a dependant on the Civil List assailed in his book. The special jury is treated to a dinner, and given two guineas for a conviction, and but one guinea and no dinner for acquittal. Even a fairly selected local jury could not justly determine a constitutional issue affecting every part of the empire. So Paine brings under scrutiny every part of the legal machinery sprung on him, adding new illustrations of his charges against the whole system. He begins the siege, which Bradlaugh was to carry forward in a later time, against the corrupt Pension List, introducing it with his promised exposure of Edmund Burke. Near the end of Lord North's administration Burke brought in a bill by which it was provided that a pension or annuity might be given without name, if under oath that it was not for the benefit of a member of the House of Commons. Burke's pension had been taken out under the name of another man; but being under the necessity of mortgaging it, the real pensioner had to be disclosed to the mortgagee.* For the rest, this "Address to the Addressers," as it was popularly called,--or "Part Third of the Rights of Man," as one publisher entitled it,--sowed broadcast through England passages that were recited in assemblies, and sentences that became proverbs. * This disclosure, though not disproved, is passed over silently by most historians. Nevertheless it was probably that which ended Burke's parliamentary career. Two years later, at the age of sixty-two, he retired with an accumulation of pensions given at the king's request, amounting to £3,700 per annum. His reputation had been built up on his supposed energy in favor of economy. The secret and illegal pension (£1,500) cast light on his sudden coalition with Lord North, whom he once proposed to impeach as a traitor. The title of "masked pensioner" given by Paine branded Burke. Writing in 1819 Cobbett says: "As my Lord Grenville introduced the name of Burke, suffer me, my Lord, to introduce that of the man [Paine] who put this Burke to shame, who drove him off the public stage to seek shelter in the pension list, and who is now named fifty million times where the name of the pensioned Burke is mentioned once." "It is a dangerous attempt in any government to say to a Nation, _Thou shalt not read_." "Thought, by some means or other, is got abroad in the world, and cannot be restrained, though reading may." "Whatever the rights of the people are, they have a right to them, and none have a right either to withhold or to grant them."