Macaulay and the Freedom of the Press

Extract

Some four years before the appearance of Mill's On Liberty, Macaulay sang the praises of the freedom of the press in his History of England. One hundred and sixty years earlier, in 1695, the censorship of the press had been withdrawn in England. Prior to this event, according to Macaulay, the prohibition of political criticism had elicited a flourishing trade in contraband criticism to which moderation was unknown. Its creators and distributors were not law-abiding citizens, and their character was not high. In fact, what they produced was unprincipled, fanatical, wild and dissolute in the extreme.

For the aftermath, we must quote at length:

… The emancipation of the press produced a great and salutary change. The best and wisest men in the ranks of the opposition now assumed an office which had hitherto been abandoned to the unprincipled or the hotheaded. Tracts against the government were written in a style not misbecoming statesmen and gentlemen; and even the compositions of the lower and fiercer class of malcontents became somewhat less brutal and less ribald than in the days of the licensers.