had to say.

One argument with which Anderton had been furnished by his advisers,
and which, in the Jacobite pasquinades of that time, is represented as
unanswerable, was that, as the art of printing had been unknown in the
reign of Edward the Third, printing could not be an overt act of treason
under a statute of that reign. The judges treated this argument very
lightly; and they were surely justified in so treating it. For it is
an argument which would lead to the conclusion that it could not be an
overt act of treason to behead a King with a guillotine or to shoot him
with a Minie rifle.

It was also urged in Anderton's favour,--and this was undoubtedly an
argument well entitled to consideration,--that a distinction ought to
be made between the author of a treasonable paper and the man who merely
printed it. The former could not pretend that he had not understood the
meaning of the words which he had himself selected. But to the latter
those words might convey no idea whatever. The metaphors, the allusions,
the sarcasms, might be far beyond his comprehension; and, while his
hands were busy among the types, his thoughts might be wandering to
things altogether unconnected with the manuscript which was before him.
It is undoubtedly true that it may be no crime to print what it would be
a great crime to write. But this is evidently a matter concerning
which no general rule can be laid down. Whether Anderton had, as a mere
mechanic, contributed to spread a work the tendency of which he did
not suspect, or had knowingly lent his help to raise a rebellion, was
a question for the jury; and the jury might reasonably infer from his
change of his name, from the secret manner in which he worked, from the
strict watch kept by his wife and mother, and from the fury with which,
even in the grasp of the messengers, he railed at the government,
that he was not the unconscious tool, but the intelligent and zealous
accomplice of traitors. The twelve, after passing a considerable time
in deliberation, informed the Court that one of them entertained doubts.
Those doubts were removed by the arguments of Treby and Powell; and a
verdict of Guilty was found.

The fate of the prisoner remained during sometime in suspense. The
Ministers hoped that he might be induced to save his own neck at the
expense of the necks of the pamphleteers who had employed him. But his
natural courage was kept up by spiritual stimulants which the nonjuring
divin