This tribute does not take Peter Zenger out of living history to place him in a museum. Rather does it emphasize the truth that his memory will never die as long as American democracy survives. Interest in his trial should never flag if only because freedom of the press is not something that can be taken for granted. In our time the Communist and Fascist challenges have compelled us to go back to our national origins to justify our way of life. That way of life stands or falls with the right of journalists to criticize the government. We cannot afford to ignore or slur over the printer and his colleagues who first insisted on independence in publishing the news, put their principle into practice, produced a great newspaper that magnificently vindicated them, defended their newspaper in the teeth of official condemnation and judicial indictment, and were so obviously in the right that a jury of their fellow citizens upheld them in spite of a hostile court. Peter Zenger was never more of a portent and a precedent than he is today. 3. The Text This edition of the trial is, like all others, based on _A Brief Narrative of the Case and Tryal of John Peter Zenger, Printer of the New York Weekly Journal_, which was edited by James Alexander and printed by the Zenger press in 1736. Alexander’s is the only authentic version, for he was the sole person close to the affair who undertook to prepare a written text. He was in this, as in so many other ways, the formal apologist for his side. A rival edition would have been logical, and could easily have been produced by the men of the prosecution, but they never saw fit to attempt their own vindication. Indeed, Attorney General Bradley declined even to participate in publication, withholding his notes and his brief when the Zenger camp asked to see them, refusing any kind of advice, comment, correction, or even objection; obviously because, staggered and humiliated by the acquittal, he was in no mood to help embalm his courtroom defeat in print. It is a pity that he allowed his case to go by default. He could not, of course, have changed the pleading as we find it set down, except possibly for minor points of emphasis or phraseology, but he might have made a more respectable showing than he does in the bare synopses to which the _Brief Narrative_ is reduced from time to time. True, he might have appeared in an even worse light; perhaps he was afraid that that was exactly what his opponents had in mind. Nevertheless, at the very least he would have allowed the public and posterity to view what happened from his angle of vision. He deliberately chose not to do so. The defense had no inhibitions about publishing a full account of the trial. The cheering and shouting had scarcely died away before Alexander was at work copying out the arguments, arranging notes, gathering information from those who could fill in the gaps for him.