PREFACE,

By Mr. THOMSON.

THERE is no need of a Preface to

recommend this admirable defence

of the best of human rights, to any one who has ever heard of the DIVINE MILTON and it is impoffible to produce better arguments, or to fer them in a more convincing, awakening light.

Is it poffible that any Free-born Briton, who is capable of thinking, can ever lofe all fense of religion and virtue, and of the dignity of human nature to fuch a degree, as to with for that univerfal Ignorance, Darknefs, and Barbarity,' againft

against which the abfolute Freedom of the Prefs is the only Prefervative? For what else spreads light, or diffuses knowledge through the world? But it seems, as a sense of the value of health is fometimes loft in the midft of its full enjoyment; fo men, through a habit of liberty, may become infenfible of its ineftimable worth: otherwife would not every one awake, rouse himself, and say, when the most dear and valuable of all the privileges, that government is defigned to protect, is menaced, "That he will "fooner part with life itself than with "that liberty without which life is not "worth the having: that he will fooner "suffer his eyes to be put out, than his "understanding to be extinguished."

We are told in hiftory of a people

that, after they had been inured to flavery, were in a panick fear, when their liberty was offered to them. And this terrible effect of flavery ought to make every lover of mankind tremble at the thoughts of any fteps or approaches towards the diminution of liberty. "For " without it, as Homer has told us,' "men foon cease to be men: they foon ❝cease to be rational creatures."

Now without the abfolute unbounded freedom of writing and publishing, there is no liberty; no fhadow of it: it is an empty found. For what can Liberty mean, if it does not mean, the Liberty of exercising, improving, and informing *The Cappadocians.

our

our understandings? "A people have "Liberty," faid a truly good king of England, when they are free as thought

is free. What is it that makes a city,

(faid the good Alcæus, a poet, whose

mufe was always facred and faithful to "the beft of caufes) it is not walls and buildings; no, it is being inhabited

by men by men, who know them"felves to be men, and have fuitable "notions of the dignity of human na

ture: by men, who know what it is

alone that exalts them above the brutes." Can we be either virtuous or religious, without the free ufe of our reafon, without the means of knowledge? And can we have knowledge, if men

Elfrid.

dare