years, or with imprisonment with or without hard labour for a period not exceeding two years.

SUMMARY PROCEEDINGS.

OBSCENE LIBELS.-By 20 & 21 Vict. c. 83, large powers of seizure and destruction are given to magistrates on sworn information, shewing that printed matter of an indecent character is kept in any place for the purpose of sale or exhibition for profit. An appeal from the magistrates' decision lies to the Quarter Sessions.

By 5 Geo. 4 c. 83, s. 4, and 1 & 2 Vict. c. 83, s. 2, any person exposing or exhibiting any indecent prints or pictures in a public place or in a window or house in a public place, is to be deemed a rogue and a vagabond, and punished on summary conviction. It is obvious that under certain circumstances these enactments might apply to prints purporting to be newspapers or parts of

newspapers.

Indictments for obscene libel may be returned for trial to Quarter Sessions.

CONTEMPTS.-Contempts can be punished summarily by committal to prison or by fine, or both.

In O'Shea v. O'Shea and Parnell the question arose whether judgments in cases of contempt of Court committed by persons not parties to an action-such as attacks in newspapers on the judge or the parties in an action—were judgments in a criminal matter or cause within sect. 47 of the Judicature Act of 1873, and from which, therefore, there is no appeal. The Court of Appeal held that they were. Lopes, L.J., in his judgment says: "There are different kinds of attachment for contempt. One kind of attachment is to enforce obedience to an order made in a civil action or proceeding, against one of the parties, in respect of something the doing

P

15 P. & D.

D. 59.

(1890.)

or not doing of which is not a criminal act. That could not be an order in a criminal cause or matter within sect. 47. ... But there is another kind of attachment which is the subject of an independent application against a person who is not a party to the suit in respect of an act done outside the suit, and which act is criminal. That, I think, is within the words of sect. 47. The application on which the present order was made was an application by the petitioner in the divorce action, in reference to an attempt made by a stranger to the suit to interfere with the administration of justice in the action, but it is made outside the action. The object of the application was to obtain the punishment of the appellant, and the proceeding ended with the order against him. I am clearly of opinion that this order was made in a criminal matter."

PART III.

FOREIGN PRESS LAWS.

At

THE development of the Law relating to the Press has in all countries followed much the same course. first the invention of the printing-press was generally welcomed, and German printers were encouraged to establish themselves at the various Courts and Universities throughout western Europe. In France, where intellectual activity was then at its height-in Paris and Orleans alone some ten thousand copyists were constantly employed in the multiplication of manuscripts-there was naturally eager curiosity about the new invention, and in 1470, the year before Caxton began printing under the protection of the Abbot of Westminster, Ulrich Gering set up a press in the Sorbonne, the theological faculty of the University of Paris. Three years later Louis XI. granted letters patent to this same "Uldaric Quéring" and two other Germans authorising them "de faire livres de plusieures manières d'écritures, en moslé et autrement," and before many years more than fifty printing presses were at work in Paris.

For a time, no doubt, the Church and the universities were able to control the new power, as they had all along regulated the issue and sale of manuscripts; but as the presses multiplied the task became impossible, especially as the unrest of the New Learning was even

then beginning to spread throughout Europe. In 1496 Pope Alexander VI. exhorted the bishops to greater vigilance in preventing the appearance of unauthorised books, and in 1501 a special Bull was issued threatening with excommunication any printer who issued a book without first "asking the advice" and obtaining the permission of the archbishop in whose province the book was to appear, or his representative. From this time forth the principle of the Censorship was definitely established. It was consolidated and extended by Leo X. in 1515, and from 1524 to 1548 a series of Imperial Diets drew up regulations of similar import and of everincreasing stringency for the use of the civil power in Germany. In Paris the King and the Sorbonne soon repented of their over-hasty welcome, and in 1535 an edict of Francis I., absolutely prohibited the printing of books, the penalty for infraction being death. Such an order could not be enforced, and it was soon replaced by another, giving full power to the Sorbonne to decide on the fate of books, and of their authors and printers, and this practically continued in force till the Revolution. In England the Ecclesiastical Courts and the Court of Star Chamber appear both to have claimed and exercised the right of censorship, the power of the latter body being firmly established by an Order of the Court, drawn up in the reign of Elizabeth (1585). When the Court of Star Chamber was abolished by the Long Parliament in 1641, the censorship was expressly retained, and did not finally disappear from our statute book till 1695.

The abolition of the censorship by the Parliament of William III., and the consequent establishment of the English press on the firm basis of "freedom from pre

vious restraint," supplied the advocates of similar liberty abroad, all through the eighteenth century, with an example, while in Milton's "Areopagitica," they had a text book. To Denmark belongs the credit of being the first Continental state to adopt the principle of liberty. It is true that the Rescript of September, 1770, did not long survive its real author, the ill-starred Struensee, whose death on the scaffold formed a gloomy close to a short and most dramatic chapter in Danish history, but still the fact deserves to be recorded-if for nothing else, because it gave occasion to Voltaire's "Epître au Roi de Danemark "-that Christian VII. was the first sovereign to proclaim "the unrestricted liberty of the press throughout all his dominions. American colonies, when they began their struggle for independence, naturally gave prominence to the claim for which, in great measure, they had crossed the Atlantic; "the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience." Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, and Delaware embodied in their constitutions, adopted in 1776, the doctrine of liberty, and when the time came for drawing up the Constitution of the United States, one of its earliest provisions was (Amendment of 1789, Art. 1) that "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press."

The

The censorship established in France by Francis I., continued in force till the Revolution, when it disappeared with the rest. Liberty, in theory at least, took its place for a time. Article 11 of the constitution of 1791 runs thus:-"La libre communication des pensées et des opinions est un des droits les plus précieux de l'homme. Tout citoyen peut donc parler, écrire, im