until he has opened it?” Such were the arguments which did what Milton’s “Areopagitica” had failed to do. But what we mean to-day by the term, the liberty of the press, is much more than the mere right to print without a previous application to a censor. The position which the press holds in this generation is the result of a slow but steady growth. After the refusal by Parliament to renew the Licensing Act the courts still did their best to prevent the reaping of any benefit from this. Newspaper reporting, and especially the reporting of Parliamentary debates was frowned on by Bench and Parliament alike. In 1722 the House of Commons passed the resolution “That no printer or publisher of any printed newspaper do presume to insert in any such papers any debates or other proceedings of this house or any committee thereof” and when Edward Cave in 1731 began to publish in his “Gentleman’s Magazine” a report of the debates he had to resort to the fiction of a “Senate of Great Lilliput” and even then lived in continual fear of prosecution. As time passed Parliamentary reporting came to be tacitly recognized, but the law of libel still retained all its terrors. Bentham told the truth when he said “Anything which any man for any reason, chooses to be offended with is libel.” Lord Mansfield in the case of Henry Sampson Woodfall, prosecuted for publishing a seditious libel, enunciated the theory that the work of the jury began and ended with deciding the fact as to whether the accused was or was not responsible for the publication of the matter complained of, the crown, through the court, to decide whether the matter was libellous. For twenty years the question was fought over, and at last in 1791, Fox having changed his views in the matter, introduced his famous bill to amend the law of libel, and in 1792 the bill became law. The importance of this act can hardly be overestimated. After stating that “doubts have risen whether on the trial of an indictment or information for the making and publishing any libel, where an issue or issues are joined between the king and the defendant or defendants, on the plea of not guilty pleaded it be competent to the jury empanelled to try the same to give their verdict upon the whole matter in issue.” It goes on to enact that “the jury may give a general verdict of guilty or not guilty upon the whole matter in issue, and shall not be required or directed by the court or judge to find the defendant guilty merely in the proof of the publication by such defendant of the paper charged to be a libel, and of the sense ascribed to it in the indictment or information.” In the same spirit Judge Fitzgerald told a jury[45] “You are the sole judges of the guilt or innocence of the defendant. The judges are here to give any help they can; but the jury are the judges of law and fact, and on them rests the whole responsibility.”