(8.) In 1793 a charge was brought against the Rev. Thomas Fyshe Palmer, formerly a Senior Fellow of Queen's College, Cambridge, and then a Unitarian minister at Dundee. Mr. Palmer wrote an Address which was adopted at a meeting of the Friends of Liberty and published by them, which, in moderate language, called on the People "to join us in our exertions for the preservation of our perishing liberty, and the recovery of our long lost rights." He distributed copies of this address. He was prosecuted for "Leasing-making," for publishing a "seditious and inflammatory writing." The (Scotch) jury found him guilty, and the judges sentenced him to _transportation for seven years_. The sentence was executed with rigorous harshness.[136] [Footnote 136: 23 St. Tr. 237; Belsham's History of George III.] (9.) The same year Thomas Muir, Esq., was brought to trial for Leasing-making or public Libel at Edinburgh. He was a promising young lawyer, with liberal tendencies in politics, desiring the education of the great mass of the people and a reform in Parliament. He was a member of various Reform societies, and sometimes spoke at their meetings in a moderate tone recommending only legal efforts--by discussion and petition--to remedy the public grievances. His Honor (Mr. Curtis) who belongs to a family so notoriously "democratic" in the beginning of this century, and so eager in its denunciations of the Federalists of that period, knows that the law even of England--which they so much hated--allows all that. It appeared that Mr. Muir also lent a copy of Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" to a mechanic who asked the loan as a favor. For these offences he was indicted for sedition, charged with instituting "a Society for Reform," and with an endeavor "to represent the government of this country as oppressive and tyrannical, and the legislative body as venal and corrupt." It was alleged in the indictment that he complained of the government of England as "costly," the monarchy as "useless, cumbersome, and expensive," that he advised persons to read Paine's Rights of Man, and circulated copies of a periodical called "the _Patriot_," which complained of the grievances of the people. On trial he was treated with great insolence and harshness, reprimanded, interrupted, and insulted by the agents of the government--the court. An association of men had offered a reward of five guineas for the discovery of any person who circulated the writings of Thomas Paine. Five of the fifteen jurors were members of that association,--and in Scotland a bare majority of the jurors convicts. Mr. Muir defended himself, and that ably. Lord Justice Clark charged his packed jury:--