§ MR. AYRTON, in rising to move for leave to bring in a Bill to repeal certain Acts, and parts of Acts, relating to Newspapers, Pamphlets, and other publications, and to Printers, Type Founders, and Reading Rooms, said, that although, as he believed, no opposition would be offered to the introduction of his Bill, it was the wish of the right hon. Gentleman opposite that he should clearly know what were its objects. The subject was one which went back a number of years in the annals of legislation. The statutes which he sought to repeal were the growth of evil times, and it was necessary to recur to them to discover how they had been placed upon the Statute-book. So early as the reign of Queen Anne the Ministers of that day imagined that the periodical press was injurious to the interests of the State, that it might be applied to seditious objects, and that it was therefore necessary to take steps to repress what they deemed to be a great public grievance. He had taken the trouble to look at the current literature of that day, and he found that it was the 485 sentiment of the House of Commons and of the public men of that time, that whatever was written and whatever was published, however temperate and however learned it might be, if it was adverse to their opinions, if it was written with strength and purpose, ought to be regarded as a wicked and seditious libel. If it touched upon the affairs of religion, if it was adverse to the opinions of the dominant party in the Established Church, then it was also an impious and blasphemous libel. Such was the character of the Resolutions of that House on publications which any one who read them now-days would regard as the most innocent and perhaps the dullest publications he could read. At last the Members of the House were aggravated to the highest degree because a document was printed which was simply a translation of a State paper of the States General of Holland. They assumed that it was fictitious, they condemned it as a wicked libel upon the House of Commons, and they immediately resolved themselves into a Committee of the whole House for the purpose of suppressing so great an evil. Consequent upon that a Bill was passed, appealing rather to the pecuniary interests of the country than to any public principle, to impose very heavy duties upon paper, upon newspapers, upon pamphlets, and upon advertisements. In order to facilitate the collection of these duties it was provided that every publication should be registered at the Stamp Office. That was the origin of the registration, which had been kept up to the present day. The next year an attempt was made to extend this registration to the authors of writings; but it was abandoned, and further duties were imposed instead of it. The press being thus deemed sufficiently weighed down was left alone until 1798, when the country became involved in war, and the insurrection broke out in Ireland. This was the occasion of further law, by which the restrictions were increased, the registration was made more minute, a form of declaration was required of the ownership of every newspaper, and a declaration whether any Foreigner was interested in it—then, perhaps a reasonable precaution against the State receiving any injury. That measure had been repealed; but most of its provisions had been re-introduced into the existing law. In 1799 another Bill was proposed by the Executive, the apology for which was the dangerous state of the country, the treasonable de- 486 signs said to be entertained of subverting Government, the plots and conspiracies existing at home and abroad,—to suppress these further powers were demanded by the Executive, and readily conceded by an overwhelming party, backing the Minister, Mr. Pitt. They went even to the extent of preventing men from reading news papers except in places licensed by a justice of the peace. Alehouses were, however, considered privileged places for reading journals, tapsters were made the guardians of public morals, but ultimately it had a very bad moral effect, as it associated the current literature of the day with drinking and intemperance. This law enforced the custom which existed throughout the country till a comparatively recent period, to resort to a publichouse for the purpose of reading the public journals. Printers, and even type-founders, and every person, however indirectly connected with literature, were brought under the notice of the Government, and required a Government licence to carry on their callings. It might be imagined that these restrictions died out with the times for which they were enacted; but the statute remained unrepealed to the present day. The only measure of relief had been to place the power of enforcing these provisions in the hands of the Crown, instead of those of the common informer. But ought such exceptional laws, framed for exceptional times, to be kept dormant on the Statute-book, leaving to the Government the right to enforce them whenever it thought fit? With these restrictions one would have thought the constitution was sufficiently protected against its imaginary enemy—the Press. But when the Continental war was brought to a close, and mens' minds were diverted from its great events to affairs at home, to the change from the past to the factitious prosperity resulting from loans, and the enormous expenditure of the country, and to the necessity of economy and a reform in Parliament, then again the Government, in 1819, resorted to extreme measures of restraint against the Press. At that time there were, no doubt many publications of so extravagant and extreme a character, as to call for repression by the arm of the law. But the Government, instead of prosecuting all journals and pamphlets really injurious to the welfare of the State, endeavoured to bring odium on the whole press, so as to be able to ask Parliament to lay still 487 further restrictions on its liberty. The Government introduced another measure, which required every person undertaking to print a newspaper or pamphlet—in short anything less in quantity than might be called a volume—or anything published at a cheap rate, to enter into recognizances, and find two sureties to the Crown of £300 in London, and £200 in the country, in case the publication should contain any matter held to be a seditious or blasphemous libel. That law further enacted severe and extravagant penalties on any persons twice convicted of such an offence. Two years afterwards, as a measure of mercy, they brought in a Bill mitigating the severity of the penalties in cases of conviction, but at the same time aggravated the pressure on publication by increasing the amount of the security from £300 to £400 in London, and from £200 to £300 in the provinces. That security was also further extended, and enforced not merely in cases of seditious and blasphemous libel, but anything that might be deemed a libel on a private individual. The security was made available, not merely for the protection of the State, but of any individual who might prove himself aggrieved by a publication. That was the extreme limit of restriction. The House would thus see that the trade of printing and publishing was considered so totally different from every other calling in the country; that these measures against it could only be justified either by the exigencies of the times, or by assuming that every man connected with literature was to be held a public delinquent, or common barrator, to be put under restraint before he could be allowed to carry on his calling. He thought the House would not accept the latter alternative. After some time, when the reform of Parliament had been accomplished, and the dread of the dangers that were anticipated from it had entirely passed away, an agitation began for relieving the current literature of the day from the difficulties in which it was placed, the enormous taxes imposed on it, and the restrictions by which it was fettered. When the duties were reduced in 1836 the statutes above noticed, with some exceptions, were repealed, but many of the most vexatious restrictions respecting registration and security were reenacted. In the course of several years the direct taxes were diminished. In 1836 when the right hon. Gentleman who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. 488 Gladstone) proposed the abolition of the stamp duties on newspapers, he intended, at the same time, to repeal nearly all the statutes then in force; but in consequence of the objections which were taken to such a course, the right hon. Gentleman, to obviate any delay in the settlement of the fiscal question, relinquished his design, and almost all the most obnoxious provisions of the law were left on the Statute-book. The object of his (Mr. Ayrton's) Motion was to sweep away all those vexatious statutes, and to limit the laws affecting newspapers and pamphlets to the general enactments that regulated all publications. There was no principle that entitled them to draw any distinction between a large book and a small one, a dear book or a cheap one; but, under the existing laws, the press was made liable to an exceptional legislation. The public had ample protection in the law that required a copy of every work, large or small, even a single sheet to be delivered to the Trustees of the British Museum, and provided, in any ease of omission of such delivery, that the publisher could be summoned before a justice of the peace, and fined. The Copyright Act also required every publisher desiring the protection of the laws relating to literature to register his publication at Stationers' Hall. Thus we had sufficient means of knowing who was the proprietor of any work printed in this country, whatever its character. We had other statutes directed expressly against criminal publications. One of these enabled the authorities, when any publication was adjudged to be a seditious or blasphemous libel, to have all the impressions of it seized, and prevented from circulating to the injury of the community. Another Act passed two Sessions ago provided for the suppression of obscene and other improper books. The latter measure was an excellent illustration of the soundness of his views against vexatious restrictions on trade, for in its original form, it contained several very extravagant provisions, interfering with the convenience of legitimate trade; but at his instance the objectionable clauses had been expunged, and in its amended shape the Act had worked satisfactorily. This showed the adequacy of the law to protect public morality, without infringing the rights of honourable traders. The statutes, however, which he sought to abolish imposed vexatious restrictions on honest men who had no wish to violate the law, but placed no effectual restraint on those who had 489 made up their minds to embark in a criminal career; for the person who meditated committing a crime was not likely to go and inform the Government, or to furnish them with evidence by which to secure his own conviction. On that ground alone the House ought to repeal these obnoxious statutes. It might have been thought, as these enactments were only passed to facilitate the collection of the revenue, that when the duty was taken off periodical publications, the executive officers would have ceased to enforce them. They were not, however, suffered to fall into abeyance. The late Member for Tewkesbury (Mr. Humphrey Brown) moved no doubt by a very high sense of morality, in 1856 addressed a remonstrance to the Commissioners of Stamps, pointing out that, in the borough which he represented, publications were issued which tended to demoralize the people, and calling for the enforcement of the penalties of the law against them. The Commissioners there upon consulted the Attorney General, and afterwards sent out a circular informing those connected with the press that they had been advised that it was their duty to enforce the law, and requiring publishers to comply with its provisions, or they would be subjected to its penalties. Upon this, innocent publishers in the country, who had hitherto thought the proceeding unnessary, were obliged, in several instances, at great inconvenience, to appeal to their friends to become security for them, thereby incurring a great deal of annoyance and trouble; while some of their brethren in London, understanding these matters much better, took no notice whatever of the circular. To test, however, the determination of the Commissioners, a publication called the Free Press was thrust upon their attention, accompanied by a challenge to them to prosecute it; but fearing they would find in that journal something like a hornet's nest, the Commissioners answered with much dignity, "that they would deal with it as seemed to them meet." It was also pointed out to the Commissioners that pamphlets, equally with newspapers, were by the statutes they were putting in force subject to registration, and that the publishers of them were required to give security, and somebody sent them a pamphlet, asking them to register it. Now, the Commissioners committed themselves to a fatal error; for they replied, that before they could say whether it ought to be register- 490 ed or not they must read it; whereupon they received a host of other pamphlets with a request that they would be good enough to peruse them, and then say whether they would register them. He found by returns presented to Parliament, on his own Motion, a wise note of the Commissioners, "that no answer was given to these applications." There was great uncertainty about this matter, the fact being that the Commissioners seemed to have authority either to enforce the law or not, as they pleased; but if it were a necessary precaution against libels, then these very stringent provisions should be enforced against every publication without reference to its being a few pages in length or low in price. Why should these statutes be kept in existence for the amusement of a body of gentlemen whose functions had been practically done away with by the repeal of the tax on newspapers? He hoped the Government would arrive, like himself, at the conclusion that these enactments were potent for mischief and powerless for good. They treated the bare idea of publishing a periodical as an incipient act of sedition, and put all persons connected with the current literature of the day without the pale of that common law to the protection of which they were as much entitled as any other class. On these grounds he asked the leave of the House to introduce his Bill.
THE SOLICITOR GENERALsaid, the hon. and learned Gentleman had called their attention to a number of Acts at present on the Statute-book relating to the publication of pamphlets and newspapers. Some of those enactments might now safely be said to be obsolete, while in regard to others, considering the date of their origin, the term obsolete could not be justly applied to them. They were still among the modern statutes of this country, and it was apparently to these that the hon. and learned Gentleman's Motion was principally directed. Whatever opinion might be entertained as to the necessity for these enactments at the time they were first passed, most people would agree as to the utter absence of any necessity for continuing them at the present day. He did not wish to commit himself as to all the enactments in those statutes. Many of them were in this position, that no law officer of the Crown would be found willing to put them in force. The consequence was that the Statute-book contained threats of penalties which were practically 491 disregarded every day, the law never being put in execution. He held it to be a sound principle for the House to proceed upon whenever they found a statute containing penalties which were never enforced, and which they never meant to enforce, that that statute should be removed from the Statute-book as speedily as possible. He therefore did not intend to offer any opposition to the introduction of this Bill. When it had been brought in they would see more precisely the particular enactments to which it would apply. Several of those to which the hon. and learned Member had referred it was desirable either wholly to repeal or greatly to modify. Others, or some portion of them, it might be expedient on the other hand to retain. With this explanation he would not offer any opposition on the part of the Government to the introduction of the measure.
§ Motion agreed to.
§ Bill to repeal certain Acts and parts of Acts relating to Newspapers, Pamphlets, and other publications, and to Printers, Type-founders, and Reading-rooms, ordered to be brought in by Mr. AYRTON, Mr. MILNER GIBSON, and Mr. COLLINS.