d, at
that moment, the political greatness and the commercial prosperity of
the realm. The House of Commons was in a flame. The Speaker issued his
warrant against Salisbury. It was resolved without a division that a
bill should be brought in to prohibit the publishing of news without a
license. Forty-eight hours later the bill was presented and read. But
the members had now had time to cool. There was scarcely one of them
whose residence in the country had not, during the preceding summer,
been made more agreeable by the London journals. Meagre as those
journals may seem to a person who has the Times daily on his breakfast
table, they were to that generation a new and abundant source of
pleasure. No Devonshire or Yorkshire gentleman, Whig or Tory, could bear
the thought of being again dependent, during seven months of every year,
for all information about what was doing in the world, on newsletters.
If the bill passed, the sheets, which were now so impatiently expected
twice a week at every country seat in the kingdom, would contain nothing
but what it suited the Secretary of State to make public; they would be,
in fact, so many London Gazettes; and the most assiduous reader of the
London Gazette might be utterly ignorant of the most important events of
his time. A few voices, however, were raised in favour of a censorship.
"These papers," it was said, "frequently contain mischievous
matter." "Then why are they not prosecuted?" was the answer. "Has the
Attorney-General filed an information against any one of them? And is
it not absurd to ask us to give a new remedy by statute, when the old
remedy afforded by the common law has never been tried?" On the question
whether the bill should be read a second time, the Ayes were only
sixteen, the Noes two hundred. [787]

Another bill, which fared better, ought to be noticed as an instance of
the slow, but steady progress of civilisation. The ancient immunities
enjoyed by some districts of the capital, of which the largest and the
most infamous was Whitefriars, had produced abuses which could no longer
be endured. The Templars on one side of Alsatia, and the citizens on the
other, had long been calling on the government and the legislature to
put down so monstrous a nuisance. Yet still, bounded on the west by the
great school of English jurisprudence, and on the east by the great mart
of English trade, stood this labyrinth of squalid, tottering houses,
close packed, every one, f