Note 2 — Chapter III · • Stirrings of Liberalism

See the account in Palfrey, History of Massachusetts, Vol. II, Book XII, p. 327; and in Wise, Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches, Introduction. The current Tory interpretation of the common law of sedition was severe. “In 1679, at the trial of Henry Carr [Care], indicted for some passages in a weekly paper, the Lord Chief Justice Scroggs declared it criminal at Common Law to ‘write on the subject of government, whether in terms of praise or censure, it is not material; for no man has a right to say anything of government’” (State Trials, VII, 929; quoted in Schuyler, The Liberty of the Press in the American Colonies, etc.)