The law lagged a little in rewriting its rules. At the time of the Zenger trial (1735) the situation was ambiguous, a fact that comes out clearly in the pleading. Peter Zenger’s acquittal helped to resolve the ambiguity along the lines of greater freedom. Governor Cosby stood for the Tudor principle. He might have coined the phrase, “The greater the truth, the greater the libel,” so well did it suit him. His regime would not bear scrutiny, for he riddled it with dubious, unethical, and illegal acts of various kinds—ignoring the rules laid down in his instructions from the Board of Trade in London, interfering with the elections and with the courts, boldly appropriating money and land, insulting the people and the Assembly of the Province—and he did not want such things to be aired, least of all in the columns of a weekly that allowed him no respite as it appeared every Monday with its reports about him and his circle of confederates. He failed in every other attempt to silence the _Journal_, and then brought the printer into a court of law to answer the charge of seditious libel. So far everything was in order. But as soon as the trial got under way things began to go wrong. Andrew Hamilton had come from Philadelphia to speak for the defense; and he, with all the eloquence for which he was famous, propounded the novel theory (novel for America, at least) that freedom of the press is a basic need of society. He insisted that the people have a right to know what their government is doing. He noted that they should be able to complain when they have a grievance against the government, and that a sure, easy, and speedy method of doing this is for them to make their opinions known in the newspapers. He pointed out the converse, that nothing of this is possible as long as the censor can blue-pencil what he chooses, since the censor is, by definition, the administration’s man, and does its bidding. Above all, he drew a sharp line between truth and falsity in reporting the news. Admitting that no one has a right to lie in print any more than in speech, he successfully inserted into the minds of the jurors the notion that an editor should be allowed to plead the authenticity of a story as his justification for publishing it. He got them to agree that the word “false” should be operative and indispensable in the kind of seditious libel of which Peter Zenger stood accused.