FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN WAR TIME 947 the New York printer, the account of which went through fourteen editions before 1791.^^ Nor was this the only colonial sedition prose- cution under the common law, and many more were threatened.^^ The First Amendment was written by men to whom Wilkes and Junius were household words, who intended to wipe out the com- mon law of sedition, and make further prosecutions for criticism of the government, without any incitement to law-breaking, forever impossible in the United States of America. It must not be forgotten that the controversy over hberty of the press was a conflict between two views of government, that the law of sedition was a product of the view that the government was master, and that the American Revolution transformed into a work- ing reality the second view that the government was servant, and therefore subjected to blame from its master, the people. Conse- quently, the words of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen about this second view have a vital application to American law.^ "To those who hold this view fully and carry it out to all its conse- quences there can be no such offence as sedition. There may indeed be breaches of the peace which may destroy or endanger life, limb, or prop- erty, and there may be incitements to such offences, but no imaginable censiu-e of the government, short of a censure which has an immediate tendency to produce such a breach oj the peace, ought to be regarded as criminal." The repudiation by the Constitutions of the English common law of sedition, which was also the common law of the American colonies, " 17 How. St. Tr. 675 (1735). The fullest account of Zenger and the trial is given by Livingston Rutherford, John Peter Zenger, New York, 1904. Rutherford's bibliography lists thirteen editions of the account of the trial before 1781. The Har- vard Law School Library contains four of these (London, 1738; London, 1752; London, 1765; New York, 1770), and also an undated copy without specified place differing from any listed by Rutherford. See also the life of Zenger's counsel, Andrew Hamilton, by William Henry Loyd, in i Great American Lawyers, i . The close relation between the Zenger trial and the prosecutions under George III in England and America is shown by the quotations on reprints of the trial and the dedication of the 1 784 London edition to Erskine. '2 C. A. DuNiwAY, Freedom of the Press in Massachusetts, 91, 93, 115, 123, 130, and note. In 1767 Chief IJustice Hutchinson charged the grand jury on Black- stonian lines, "This Liberty means no more than a Freedom for every Thing to pass from the Press without a License." Ibid., 125. " 2 Stephen, History of the Criminal Law, 300. The italics are mine. See also Schofield, 9 Proc. Am. Sociol. Soc. 75.
