agement of their own affairs. Nor will they any more suffer leading men to make up their opinions for them, as doctors do the prescriptions which they are to take, or consent to be the tools and the dupes of party any more.

384

JOHN, FOURTH DUKE OF BEDFORD.

JUNIUS-ANONYMOUS SLANDER.

THE purpose of the following observations is to rescue the memory of an able, an amiable, and an honourable man, long engaged in the public service, both as a minister, a negotiator, and a viceroy,* long filling, like all his illustrious house, in every age of our history, an exalted place among the champions of our free constitution, from the obloquy with which a licentious press loaded him when living, and from which it is in every way discreditable to British justice, that few if any attempts have, since his death, been made to counteract the effects of calumny, audaciously invented, and repeated till its work of defamation was done, and the falsehood of the hour became confounded with historical fact.

Beside the satisfaction of contributing to frustrate injustice, and deprive malice of its prey, there is this benefit to be derived from the inquiry upon which I am about to enter. We shall be enabled to test the

He was in 1744, when thirty-four years of age, first Lord of the Admiralty, in which capacity he brought forward Keppel, Howe, and Rodney. In 1748 he became Secretary of State, and continued in that office till 1751. In 1756 he went to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant, and remained there with extraordinary popularity till 1761, when he was made Lord Privy Seal. Next year he went as Ambassador to Paris, and after his return was made President of the Council. He retained this office till 1766. He was in 1768 chosen Chancellor of the University of Dublin; and died in 1771. All who have ever spoken of this excellent person, with the exception of Junius, have praised his frank and honest nature, wholly void of all dissimulation and all guile; and have borne a willing testimony to the soundness of his judgment, as well as his unshaken firmness of purpose.

claims of a noted slanderer to public confidence, and to ascertain how little he is worthy of credit in his assaults upon other reputations. But we shall also be enabled to estimate the value of the class to which he belongs, the body of unknown defamers who, lurking in concealment, bound by no tie of honour, influenced by no regard for public opinion, feeling no sense of shame, their motives wholly inscrutable, gratifying, it may be, some paltry personal spite, or actuated by some motive too sordid to be avowed by the most callous of human beings, vent their calumnies against men whose whole lives are before the world, who in vain would grapple with the nameless mob of their slanderers, but who, did they only know the hand from whence the blows are levelled, would very possibly require no other defence than at once to name their accuser. That the efforts of this despicable race have sometimes prevailed against truth and justice; that the public, in order to indulge their appetite for abuse of eminent men, have suffered the oft-repeated lie to pass current without sifting its value, and have believed what was boldly asserted, with the hardlycredible folly of mistaking for the courage of truth, the cheap daring of concealed calumniators, cannot be doubted. The effects produced by the vituperation of Junius upon the reputation of the Duke of Bedford would at once refute any one who should assert the contrary. It becomes of importance then to prove how entirely groundless all his charges were; to show how discreditable it was to the people of this country that they should be led astray by such a guide; and to draw from this instance of delusion a lesson and a warning against lending an ear to plausible, and active, and unscrupulous calumniators.

Before proceeding with our subject, however, we may stop to consider an example of the effect produced upon public opinion, even permanently, by the invention of some phrase easily remembered, and

tending to preserve the malignity of the fiction by the epigram that seems in some sort to embalm an otherwise perishable slander. At a moment of great popular excitement (July, 1769), the Livery of the city of London presented an address to the Sovereign, in which they closed a long list of grievances with the statement that "instead of punishment, honours had been bestowed upon a paymaster, the public defaulter of unaccounted millions." The recent elevation to the peerage of Henry Fox, the first Lord Holland, lately Paymaster of the Forces, was plainly here signified; and it is a humiliating reflection to those who justly prize public opinion, that it should be the sport and the dupe of such audacious impostures. For it is vain to deny that the epithet here bestowed upon that statesman has, in a certain degree, clung to his memory, and given an impression injurious to the purity of his character. The calumny being promulgated by an irresponsible body, and in an address to the throne, no proceedings at law were possible, at least none that would not have been attended with extreme difficulty in a technical view. Lord Holland, however, lost no time in giving the tale his most peremptory contradiction, and by an appeal to facts as notorious to all the world as the sun at noon-day-tide. The falsehood, like most others, rested upon a truth, but a truth grossly perverted. The moneys which had passed through the Paymaster's hands were, in one sense, wholly unaccounted; that is, the accounts of his office had not yet been wound up; but they had been delivered in, were under the examination of the auditors, and awaited the final report of these functionaries. It was shown that those accounts, which extended over the years 1757, 1758, and 1759, had reference to military expeditions in many distant parts of the globe, and that they related to a larger expenditure than in any former war had ever been incurred. Yet they were declared nine years after they

closed. But Mr. Winnington's for 1744, 1745, and 1746, were only declared in 1760, or fourteen years after their close; and Lord Chatham's, which closed in 1755, were not declared in 1769. It is also to be observed, that Lord Chatham had ceased to hold the office in 1755, and had not declared his accounts fourteen years after; whereas Lord Holland had only resigned the paymastership three years and a-half before the charge was made. He had also paid over in eight years balances to the amount of above £900, 000, arising from savings which he had effected in the sums voted for different services. It would certainly not be easy to furnish a more complete answer than the calumnious assertion of the Livery thus received. But it is also certain that the calumny long survived its triumphant refutation. Even in the later periods of party warfare it was revived against the illustrious son of its object; men of our day can well remember Mr. Fox having it often flung in his teeth, that he was sprung from the "defaulter of unaccounted millions."

The foul slanders of Junius upon the Duke of Bedford differ from the calumny of the Livery in this, that they plainly furnish to any one who attentively considers them, complete proof of their own falsehood, in by far the most material particular, and consequently should at once fall to the ground as generally discredited. And they would so fall did not men make it a rule to encourage slander and defeat the ends of truth and justice, by lending a willing ear to all that is alleged against their fellow-creatures, and overlooking, or straightway forgetting, all that is urged in their defence.

The hatred which this writer evinced towards the Duke rests, as far as it has any public ground to support it, upon the junction of the Bedford party with Lord Bute against Lord Chatham; but in all probability there was some sordid or spiteful feeling of a personal kind at the root of it. Lord Chatham had