nants of the
counties, to the effect that any justice of the peace might issue a
warrant for the apprehension of any person charged with printing a
libel. One result of this circular and the vigorous prosecutions which
ensued was that William Cobbett for a while gave up printing his
_Political Register_, and went away to America, from whence he did not
return for two years. He stated his reasons for adopting this course in
his paper, as follows:

'I do not retire from a combat with the attorney-general, but from
a combat with a dungeon, deprived of pen, ink, and paper. A combat
with the attorney-general is quite unequal enough; that, however, I
would have encountered. I know too well what a trial by special
jury is; yet that or any sort of trial I would have stayed to face.
But against the absolute power of imprisonment, without even a
hearing, for time unlimited'--an act had been passed which gave the
secretary of state power to suspend the _habeas corpus_ act--'in
any jail in the kingdom, without the use of pen, ink, and paper,
and without communication with any soul but the keepers--against
such a power it would have been worse than madness to attempt to
strive.'

But the Government met with a notable check in the case of William Howe,
the bookseller. Howe was thrice tried for libel, and, despite the
exertions of Lord Ellenborough, who descended from the judicial bench to
the barrister's table, was thrice acquitted. Persecution after this
languished for a while, but in 1819 were passed those stringent measures
which are known as the Six Acts. One of these gave the judges the power,
upon the conviction of any person a second time of the publication of a
seditious libel, to punish him with fine, imprisonment, banishment, or
transportation. But such monstrous enactments were not suffered to pass
unchallenged, and the result of several animated debates was that the
obnoxious words banishment--a novelty in English jurisprudence--and
transportation were withdrawn, but the remaining provisions of the Six
Acts were carried in all their rigor. But amid much harm, some good was
doubtless effected, for certain provisions were introduced into the act
which declared certain inferior newspapers, which had hitherto evaded
the stamp act, by calling themselves pamphlets and not newspapers,
because they only commented upon the news of the day, to be henceforth
liable to the