PREFACE. THE Freedom of the Press is our glo ry and palladium. It is, indeed, our national breath of existence, as a free independent ftate. It is the Heart of the Body-politic, through which conflitutional Life circulates freely and vigorously, giving ftrength, exertion, and activity, to every member. When it is obftructed partially, or totally destroyed, disease, or inevitable death, enfues. All nations, in proportion as they enjoy a FREE PRESS, enjoy the inestimable bleffings of perfonal liberty, and proprietary poffeffion. Some have it perfect and unlimited; for inftance, BRITAIN, and BRITISH AMERICA: Britain and America are, therefore, perfectly and without limitation, a free people. Some in a qualified and difcretionary degree, like France, whofe fubjects accordingly taste the exquisite enjoyments of Freedom, juft as the ruling powers are difpofed, from a well-conditioned, though ever-varying sense of right and justice, to fix the precife point of difcretion and qualification. Others, again, in the most abfolute terms of defpotic prohibition, of which the Pontifical States are our example: Rome and Italy, of course, are, at this prefent time, in the most deplorable ftate of stupified ignorance, and brow-fallen fubjection; a state infinitely worse than if they had not exifted as a people at all. From this fhort reprefentation it is plain, that no people now upon earth are are poffeffed of Freedom, in any fenfe worthy of men and Chriftians, but BRITONS; in which term I would comprehend Great Britain and Ireland, America, and all their widely-fpread dependancies, now (alas!) in a violent ftate of being torn and rent afunder, by the councils. and machinations of wicked men!Wonderful and dishonourable tale; that nine parts of ten of our habitable globe, should have paffively and patiently worn away more than fifty centuries, only to become the very reverse of what God, the Creator, intended man to be! The contemplation of this fubject plunges the human mind into a fathomlefs reverie, from which it never emerges, without that irresistible influx of ftrong fenfibilities, the effect of which is always pain and debasement, beyond the power of words. Efpecially is the reflective foul wounded in its feelings, when it is confidered, that fo |