nd the party guilty, and leave the rest to the judge; and
that they have nothing to do with the word _felonice_ in the indictment?

The next point is to consider it as a question of constitutional policy,
that is, whether the decision of the question of libel ought to be left
to the judges as a presumption of law, rather than to the jury as matter
of popular judgment, as the malice in the case of murder, the felony in
the case of stealing. If the intent and tendency are not matters within
the province of popular judgment, but legal and technical conclusions,
formed upon general principles of law, let us see what they are.
Certainly they are most unfavourable, indeed, totally adverse, to the
Constitution of this country.

Here we must have recourse to analogies, for we cannot argue on ruled
cases one way or the other. See the history. The old books, deficient
in general in Crown cases furnish us with little on this head. As to the
crime, in the very early Saxon Law, I see an offence of this species,
called Folk-leasing, made a capital offence, but no very precise
definition of the crime, and no trial at all: see the statute of 3rd
Edward I. cap. 34. The law of libels could not have arrived at a very
early period in this country. It is no wonder that we find no vestige of
any constitution from authority, or of any deductions from legal science
in our old books and records upon that subject. The statute of
_scandalum magnatum_ is the oldest that I know, and this goes but a
little way in this sort of learning. Libelling is not the crime of an
illiterate people. When they were thought no mean clerks who could read
and write, when he who could read and write was presumptively a person in
holy orders, libels could not be general or dangerous; and scandals
merely oral could spread little, and must perish soon. It is writing, it
is printing more emphatically, that imps calumny with those eagle wings,
on which, as the poet says, "immortal slanders fly." By the press they
spread, they last, they leave the sting in the wound. Printing was not
known in England much earlier than the reign of Henry VII., and in the
third year of that reign the Court of Star Chamber was established. The
press and its enemy are nearly coeval. As no positive law against libels
existed, they fell under the indefinite class of misdemeanours. For the
trial of misdemeanours that court was instituted, their tendency to
produce riots and disorde