or
your instruction, Gentlemen of the Jury, I will give you the chief
things in the judicial speech of Scroggs, Lord Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court of England in 1679.[85]

[Footnote 85: 6 St. Tr. 701; see Dunning in 16 Parl. Hist. 1276, _et
seq._]

"For these hireling scribblers who traduce it [the fairness
and equality of the trial in which he had been notoriously
unfair and unequal], who write to eat, and lie for bread, I
intend to meet with them another way; for they are only safe
while they can be secret; but so are vermin, so long as they
can hide themselves.... They shall know that the law wants
not the power to punish a libellous and licentious press,
nor I a resolution to exact it. And this is all the answer
is fit to be given (besides a whip) to these hackney
writers." "However, in the mean time, the _extravagant
boldness of men's pens and tongues is not to be endured, but
shall be severely punished_; for if once causes come to be
tried with complacency to particular opinions, and shall be
innocently censured if they go otherwise, public causes
shall all receive the doom as the multitude happen to be
possessed; and at length any cause shall become public ...
at every session the Judges shall be arraigned, the Jury
condemned, and the verdicts overawed to comply with popular
wish and indecent shouts."

"There are a set of men ... that too much approve and
countenance such vulgar ways, ... that embrace all sorts of
informations, true or false, likely or impossible, nay
though never so silly and ridiculous, they refuse none; so
shall all addresses be made to them, and they be looked on
as the only patrons of religion and government!"

His associates chimed in with accordant howl. Puny Judge Jones
declared,--

"We have a particular case here before us, as a matter of
scandal against a great Judge, the _greatest Judge in the
kingdom_, in criminal causes [the Lord Chancellor Nottingham
was greater in _civil_ causes]; and it is a great and an
high charge upon him. And certainly there was never any age,
I think, more licentious than this in aspersing governors,
scattering of libels and _scandalous speeches against those
that are in authority_: and without all doubt _it doth
become the court to show their zeal in suppressing it_." [It