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LIBEL
A Libel is [a Writing] tending] in any degree to the discredit of a Man. A Libel is an collection of Idea or Ideas Ideas expressed by written or printed words or by signs charging a Person certain with a Crime certain not to the deterence of the proper
In this time of Order of good government of encreasing plenty of spread
improvement, of external security, of Domestic peace, every thing swarms teems with
Libels as well what the Law would has deemed Libel, as what even any body would call so. No House in this immense metropolis but what has Libels standing upon
the Shelves or pasted against the Walls — no Street in which Libels are not sung:
he who reads, reads Libels, he who communicates what he reads, publishes them: every thing that is respectable in the nation is in some way or other daily guilty of this Crime.
Our Meat is baked upon Libels our Trunks Chests are lined with them
Lords Judges, Commons elected & electors — the whole nation is composed
of libellers & their abettors & of nothing else I know not where to stop, since the reading & is criminal extirpate Libellers and you extirpate mankind: put a stop to libelling, and you put a stop to all written discourse whereof persons are the subject[s: put a stop to censure, and you extinguish put a stop to praise: for praise is no praise, when the only alternative is that or choice is between that & silence. [Public Opinion, a powerful check upon all men, in all instances and the only one on many, the Sovereign is not a libeller, but
as much a Libeller as, if he had were he to killed a man premeditatedly and
provocation he would be a murderer: unless that virtuous Prince in the moments of
the confidence never circulated communicated ..... any of the merited reproaches with
the zeal of voluntary loyalty a loyal subject will now & then cover retort upon his calumniators:
& unless it be as "discredit" to a man to fabricate forge utter such calumnies against such
Prince.
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Thus stands the Law: and thus cruel and universal the disease which it would propagate in Society that it occasions
for this there are two remedies or rather palliations of which it will be seen how the one threatens
by the uncertainty of it's operation, & the other poisons the constitution both continuing in this, in the execution of the Law to this
latter it's preservation seems principally owing; as Arsenic has been sometimes known
to cure a one mortal disease, while it leaves behind it propagates one . the needs of others.
Were this disease disorder irremediable, I would cut off my right hand before it should thus paint it, in colours which upon repeated revisal I can not find overcharged. Humanity Nature has no worse enemies than those who employ themselves in displaying those miseries which necessity has are entailed upon it by necessity [Imagination can not reach the depth of those miseries into which an unremitted universal
execution of the Law would plunge a nation: it cannot is im- possible from the nature
of things that it should be so universally executed, & that to a degree make us secure
But what can be said for the continuance of that law
What is that Crime of which the whole nation can be guilty & scarce any one a man the
worse? subsisting remedy palliative, its an execution owing to 2 causes projective remedy.
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Identifier: | JB/070/199/001 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 70.
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070 |
of laws in general |
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199 |
libel |
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001 |
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1 |
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recto |
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jeremy bentham |
[[watermarks::[gr motif] [britannia motif]]] |
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23314 |
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