inal cases, final and conclusive.
The English bar steadily resisted those decisions as
usurpations on the rights of the jury. Some of the judges
treated the doctrine as erroneous, and the Parliament at
last declared it an innovation by restoring the trial by
jury, in cases of libel, to that ancient vigor and
independence by which it had grown so precious to the nation
as the guardian of liberty and life, against the power of
the court, the vindictive persecution of the prosecutor, and
the oppression of the government.

This celebrated opinion may safely be relied upon as a correct
statement of the law as it stood when it was delivered in 1804.
But still more conclusive authority remains to be considered. The
sedition act of 1798, after defining what should be a criminal
libel, and declaring that the defendant might give the truth of
the matter in evidence, provides as follows:

And the jury who shall try the cause shall have a right to
determine the law and the fact, under the direction of the
court, as in other cases. (1 Stat. at L., 507.)

The language of this act, "as in other cases," recognizes the
right here contended for. In the celebrated Callender trial, in
1800, which was a prosecution under this statute, Mr. Justice
Chase, whose general bearing was so unfriendly to the defendant
as to secure his impeachment by the House of Representatives,
admitted this right of the jury. He said:

We all know that juries have the right to decide the law as
well as the fact. (Wharton's State Trials, 710.) And again
he says:

I admit that the jury are to compare the statute with the
facts proved, and then to decide whether the acts done are
prohibited by the law, and whether they amount to the
offense described in the indictment. (_Ib._, p. 713.)

Though, with seeming want of logic, he held that the jury could
not decide whether the statute was constitutional or not. But the
full admission that the jury were judges of the law as well as
the fact, shows the general understanding upon this subject,
though the judge may have erred in applying the principle in the
case before him. In Fries's case, who was tried for treason,
1799-1800, the jury w