ing your Lordship for the very indulgent attention I have received, though in so late a stage of this business, and notwithstanding my great incapacity and inexperience. I resign my client into your hands, and I resign him with a well-founded confidence and hope; because that torrent of corruption, which has unhappily overwhelmed every other part of the constitution, is, by the blessing of Providence, stopped HERE by the sacred independence of the Judges. I know that your Lordships will determine ACCORDING TO LAW; and, therefore, if an information should be suffered to be filed I shall bow to the sentence, and shall consider this meritorious publication to be indeed an offence against the laws of this country; but then I shall not scruple to say, that it is high time for every honest man to remove himself from a country, in which he can no longer do his duty to the public with safety;-where cruelty and inhumanity are suffered to impeach virtue, and where vice passes through a Court of Justice unpunished and unreproved.

SPEECH for THOMAS CARNAN, Bookseller, at the Bar of the House of Commons, on the 10th of May, 1779.

As taken in Short-hand.

THE SUBJECT.

BY letters patent of King James the First, the Stationers' Company, and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge had obtained the exclusive right of printing almanacks, by virtue of a supposed copyright in the Crown. This monopoly had been submitted to from the date of the grant in the last century, until Mr. Carnan, formerly a bookseller in St. Paul's Churchyard, printed them and sold them, in the ordinary course of his trade. This spirited and active tradesman made many improvements upon the Stationers' and University almanacks, and at a very considerable expense, compiled many of the various classes of useful information, by which pocket almanacks have been rendered so very convenient in the ordinary occurrences of life, but which, without the addition of the calendar, few would have been disposed to purchase.

Upon the sale of Carnan's almanacks becoming extensive and profitable, the two Universities and the Stationers' Company filed a bill in the Court of Exchequer, for an injunction to restrain it; praying that the copies sold might be accounted for, and the remainder delivered up to be cancelled.

It appears from the proceedings printed at the time by the late Mr. Carnan, that the Court, doubting the validity of the King's Charter, on which the right of the Universities and of the Stationers' Company was founded, directed a question upon its legality to be argued before the Court of Common Pleas, whose Judges, after two arguments before them, certified that the patent was void in law; the Court of Exchequer thereupon dismissed the bill, and the injunction was dissolved.

Mr. Carnan having obtained this judgment, prosecuted his trade for a short time with increased activity, when a bill was introduced into the House of Commons by the late Earl of Guilford, then Lord North, Prime Minister, and Chancellor of the University of Oxford, TO REVEST, BY ACT OF PARLIAMENT, THE MON

OPOLY IN ALMANACKS, WHICH HAD FALLEN TO THE GROUND BY THE ABOVEMENTIONED JUDGMENTS IN THE KING'S COURTS.

The preamble of the bill recited the exclusive right given to the Stationers and Universities by the charter of Charles the Second, as a fund for printing of curious and learned books, the uniform enjoyment under it, the judgments of the courts of law upon the invali dity of the charter, and the expediency of regranting the monopoly for the same useful purposes by the authority of Parliament.

The bill being supported by all the influence of the two Universities in the House of Commons, and being introduced by Lord North in the plenitude of his authority, Mr. Carnan's opposition to it by counsel was considered at the time as a forlorn hope; but to the high honour of the House of Commons, it appears from the Journals, vol. xxxvii. p. 388, that immediately on Mr. Erskine's retiring from the bar, the House divided, and that the bill was rejected by a majority of forty-five votes.

SPEECH

FOR

THOMAS CARNAN,

AT THE BAR OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS,
On the 10th of May, 1779.

MR. SPEAKer,

IN preparing myself to appear before you, as counsel for

a private individual, to oppose the enactment of a general and public statute, which was to affect the whole community, I felt myself under some sort of difficulty. Conscious that no man, or body of men, had a right to dictate to, or even to argue with Parliament on the exercise of the high and important trust of legislation, and that the policy and expediency of a law was rather the subject of debate in the House, than of argument at the bar, I was afraid that I should be obliged to confine myself to the special injury, which the Petitioner as an individual would suffer, and that you might be offended with any general observations, which, if not applying to him personally, might be thought unbecoming in me to offer to the superior wisdom of the House.

But I am relieved from that apprehension by the great indulgence, with which you have listened to the general scope of the question from the learned gentleman,* who has spoken before me, and likewise by the reflection, that I remember no instance, where Parliament has taken away any right conferred by the law as a common benefit, without very satisfactory evidence, that the universal good of the community required the sacrifice; because every unnecessary restraint on the natural liberty of mankind is a degree of tyranny, which no wise legislature will inflict.

The general policy of the bill is then fully open to my investigation; because, if I can succeed in exposing the erroneous

* Mr. Davenport.