A Charge, delivered to the Grand Jury of the County of Chester, at the Quarter-Sessions held at Chester, on Tuesday the 15th of January, 1793

Extract

Gentlemen of the Grand Jury, I Am directed to make it part of my charge to you, on this occasion, that you diligently inquire and true presentment make of all wicked and seditious writings dial have come to your knowledge. — This, Gentlemen, is one of the means that Government has adopted to suppress such publications, as you all know have remarkably abounded of late in this kingdom, justly alarmed, as it should seem, at the danger direatened diereby to our happy constitution. And it is a means, which at the same time that it bespeaks a proper vigilance in those that have the present direction of our affairs, exhibits to us an ample proof of the excellence of the government under which we live: It is a luminous display of the perfect civil liberty which Englishmen actually enjoy; that however wantonly provoked, the executive power dares not lift the hand of punishment against the meanest of its citizens, before a dispassionate enquiry is made into the probability of his guilt, by a jury of his fellow-citizens and equals, previous even to his being brought under the hazard of a trial for his offence.