attending this affair, to the prejudice of the poor men; I am commanded by their lordships to desire you to call the officers together in council, and to let them know, that their lordships think them very blameable for suffering such abuses to be practised, which could not have been done without their extreme indolence in not looking into the affairs of the Hospital; that their own establishment in the Hospital is for the care and protection of the poor men, and that it is their duty to look daily into everything, and to remedy every disorder; and not to discharge themselves by throwing it upon the under-officers and servants; and that their lordships, being determined to go to the bottom of this complaint, do charge them to find out and inform them at whose door the fraud ought to be laid, that their lordships may give such directions herein as they shall judge proper.

"I am, Sir, your most obedient servant,

"THOS. CORBET.'

"To Sir John Jennings, Governor of Greenwich Hospital.

"Admiralty Office, May 7th, 1742.

"SIR,-My Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty having referred to the Directors of Greenwich Hospital, the report made by yourself and officers of the said Hospital in council, dated the 23rd past, relating to the flatness of the pewter dishes made use of to hold the broth and pease-pottage served out to the pensioners; the said Directors have returned hither a reply, a copy of which I am ordered to send you enclosed: they have herein set forth a fact which has a very fraudulent appearance, and it imports little by what means the dishes became shallow; but if it be true, what they assert, that the dishes hold but little more than half the quantity they ought to do, the poor men must have been greatly injured; and the allegations in the officers' report, that the pensioners have made no complaint, does rather aggravate their conduct, in suffering the men's patience to be so long imposed upon.

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My Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty do command me to express myself in such a manner as may show their wrath and displeasure at such a proceeding. You will please to communicate this to the officers of the house in council.

"Their lordships do very well know that the Directors have no power but in the management of the revenue and estates of the Hospital, and in carrying on the works of the building, nor did they assume any on this occasion; but their lordships shall always take well of them any informations that tend to rectify any mistakes or omissions whatsoever, concerning the state of the Hospital.

"From these passages it is plain, that the Admiralty then was sensible of the danger of abuses in so extensive an institution, that it encouraged complaints from all quarters, and instantly redressed them; for although

Corruption was not then an infant, yet the idea of making a job of Greenwich Hospital never entered her head; and, indeed, if it had, she could hardly have found, at that time of day, a man with a heart callous enough to consent to such a scheme, or with forehead enough to carry it into public execution.

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Secondly, my lord, that the abuses he has investigated do in truth exist, and arise from the ascribed causes.

"And, at the word, TRUTH, I must pause a little to consider, how far it is a defence on a rule of this kind, and what evidence of the falsehood of the supposed libel the Court expects from prosecutors, before it will allow the information to be filed, even where no affidavits are produced by the defendant in his exculpation.*

"That a libel upon an individual is not the less so for being true,† I do not, under certain restrictions, deny to be law; nor is it necessary for me to deny it, because this is not a complaint in the ordinary course of law, but an application to the Court to exert an eccentric, extraordinary, voluntary jurisdiction, beyond the ordinary course of justice-a jurisdiction which, I am authorised from the best authority to say, this Court will not exercise, unless the prosecutors come pure and unpolluted; denying, upon oath, the truth of every word and sentence which they complain of as injurious: for although, in common cases, the matter may not be the less libellous because true, yet the Court will not interfere by information, for guilty, or even equivocal characters, but will leave them to its ordinary process. If the Court does not see palpable malice and falsehood on the part of the defendant, and clear innocence on the part of the prosecutor, it will not stir; it will say, 'This may be a libel; this may deserve punishment; but go to a grand jury, or bring your actions: all men are equally entitled to the protection of the laws, but all men are not equally entitled to an extraordinary interposition and protection, beyond the common distributive forms of justice.'

"This is the true constitutional doctrine of informations, and made a

• A criminal information is a written suggestion of an offence committed, filed in the Court of Queen's Bench at the instance of an individual by the leave of the Court, without the intervention of a grand jury. The Court will not, therefore, give such leave, unless the party applying disclose fully, on affidavit, all the material facts of the case, and satisfy the Court that a grand jury would, on such evidence, sanction an indictment if preferred; and if the cause of the application for leave to file a criminal information be a libel on an individual, the Court always require the prosecutor to deny the truth of the charge on oath.

+ In the case of an indictment for libel, the truth of the alleged libel could not, until very recently, have been set up in defence or mitigation of punishment. Now, by 6 and 7 Vic., cap. 96, sec. 6, on the trial of any indictment or information for a defamatory libel, the truth of the matters charged may be inquired into (if the defendant have pleaded as prescribed by this statute), but shall not amount to a defence, unless it was for the public benefit that the said matter charged should be published.

Indictment may be considered the ordinary mode, as distinguished from criminal information, the peculiar mode of prosecution.

strong impression upon me, when delivered by your lordship in this Court; the occasion which produced it was of little consequence, but the principle was important. It was an information moved for by General Plasto against the printer of the Westminster Gazette,' for a libel published in his paper, charging that gentleman, among other things, with having been tried at the Old Bailey for a felony. The prosecutor's affidavit denied the charges. generally as foul, scandalous, and false; but did not traverse the aspersion I have just mentioned, as a substantive fact: upon which your lordship told the counsel, who was too learned to argue against the objection, that the affidavit was defective in that particular, and should be amended before the Court would even grant a rule to show cause. For although such general denial would be sufficient where the libellous matter consisted of scurrility, insinuation, general abuse, which is no otherwise traversable than by inuendos of the import of the scandal, and a denial of the truth of it, yet that when a libel consisted of direct and positive facts as charges, the Court required substantive traverses of such facts in the affidavit, before it would interpose to take the matter from the cognisance of a grand jury.

"This is the law of informations; and by this touchstone I will try the prosecutors' affidavits, to show that they will fall of themselves, even without that body of evidence, with which I can in a moment overwhelm them.

"If the defendant be guilty of any crime at all, it is for writing this book and the conclusion of his guilt or innocence must consequently depend on the scope and design of it, the general truth of it, and the necessity for writing it; and this conclusion can no otherwise be drawn, than by taking the whole of it together. Your lordships will not shut your eyes, as these prosecutors expect, to the design and general truth of the book, and go entirely upon the insulated passages, culled out, and set heads and points in their wretched affidavits, without context, or even an attempt to unriddle or explain their sense, or bearing on the subject; for, my lord, they have altogether omitted to traverse the scandalous facts themselves, and have only laid hold of those warm animadversions which the recital of them naturally produced in the mind of an honest, zealous man, and which, besides, are in many places only conclusions drawn from facts as general propositions, and not aspersions on them as individuals. And where the facts do come home to them as charges, not one of them is denied by the prosecutors. I assert, my lord, that in the Directors' whole affidavit (which I have read repeatedly, and with the greatest attention) there is not any one fact mentioned by the defendant, which is substantially denied; and even when five or six strong and pointed charges are tacked to each other, to avoid meeting naked truth in the teeth, they are not even contradicted by the lump, but a general inuendo is pinned to them all;-a mere illusory averment, that the facts mean to criminate them, and that they are not criminal; but the facts themselves remain unattempted and untouched.

* Mr. Dunning.

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Thus, my lord, after reciting in their affidavit the charge of their shameful misconduct in renewing the contract with the Huntingdon butchers, who had just compounded the penalties incurred by the breach of a former contract, and in that breach of contract, the breach of every principle of humanity, as well as of honesty ;-and the charge of putting improper objects of charity into the hospital, while the families of poor pensioners were excluded, and starving;-and of screening delinquents from inquiry and punishment in a pointed and particular instance, and therefore traversable as a substantive fact; yet, not only there is no such traverse, but, though all these matters are huddled together in a mass, there is not even a general denial: but one loose inuendo, that the facts in the publication are stated with an intention of criminating the prosecutors, and that, as far as they tend to criminate them, they are false.

"Will this meet the doctrine laid down by your lordship in the case of General Plasto? Who can tell what they mean by criminality? Perhaps they think neglect of duty not criminal; perhaps they think corrupt servility to a patron not criminal; and that if they do not actively promote abuses, the winking at them is not criminal. But I appeal to the court, whether the Directors' whole affidavit is not a cautious composition to avoid downright perjury, and yet a glaring absurdity on the face of it; for since the facts are not traversed, the court must intend them to exist: and if they do exist, they cannot but be criminal. The very existence of such abuses, in itself criminates those whose offices are to prevent them from existing. Under the shelter of such qualifications of guilt, no man in trust could ever be criminated. But at all events, my lord, since they seem to think that the facts may exist without their criminality-be it so the defendant, then, does not wish to criminate them; he wishes only for effectual inquiry and information, that there may be no longer any crimes, and consequently no criminality. But he trusts, in the mean time, and I likewise trust, that, while these facts do exist, the court will at least desire the prosecutors to clear themselves before the general council of governors, to whom the writing is addressed, and not before any packed committee of directors appointed by a noble lord,* and then come back to the court acquitted of all criminality, or, according to the technical phrase, with clean hands, for protection.

'Such are the merits of the affidavits exhibited by the Directors; and the affidavits of the other persons are, without distinction, subject to the same observations. They are made up either of general propositions, converted into charges by ridiculous inuendos, or else of strings of distinct disjointed facts tied together, and explained by one general averment: and after all, the scandal, such as their arbitary interpretation makes it, is still only denied with the old jesuitical qualification of criminality, the facts themselves remaining untraversed, and even untouched.

"They are, indeed, every way worthy of their authors-of Mr. Godby

* Meaning Lord Sandwich.

the good steward, who notwithstanding the remonstrance of the captain of the week, received for the pensioners such food as would be rejected by the idle vagrant poor, and endeavoured to tamper with the cook to conceal it ;— and of Mr. Ibbetson,* who converted their wards into apartments for himself, and the clerks of clerks, in the endless subordination of idleness; a wretch, who has dared, with brutal inhumanity, to strike those aged men, who in their youth would have blasted him with a look. As to Mr.- and Mr.

—, though I think them reprehensible for joining in this prosecution, yet they are certainly respectable men, and not at all on a level with the rest, nor has the defendant so reduced them. These two, therefore, have, in fact, no cause of complaint, and, Heaven knows, the others have no title to complain. "In this enumeration of delinquents, the Rev. Mr. Cookt looks round, as if he thought I had forgotten him. He is mistaken;-I well remembered him but his infamy is worn threadbare: Mr. Murphy has already treated him with that ridicule which his folly, and Mr. Peckham, with that invective which his wickedness, deserves. I shall therefore forbear to taint the ear of the Court further with his name; a name which would bring dishonour upon his country and its religion, if human nature were not happily compelled to bear the greater part of the disgrace, and to share it amongst mankind.

"But these observations, my lord, are solely confined to the prosecutors' affidavits, and would, I think, be fatal to them, even if they stood uncontroverted. But what will the Court say, when ours are opposed to them, where the truth of every part is sworn to by the defendant? What will the Court say to the collateral circumstances in support of them, where every material charge against the prosecutor is confirmed? What will it say to the affidavit that has been made, that no man can come safely to support this injured officer?—that men have been deprived of their places, and exposed to beggary and ruin, merely for giving evidence of abuses, which have already, by his exertions, been proved before your lordship at Guildhall, whilst he himself has been suspended as a beacon for prudence to stand aloof from, so that in this unconstitutional mode of trial, where the law will not lend its process to bring in truth by force, he might stand unprotected by the voluntary oaths of the only persons who could witness for him? His character has, indeed, in some measure, broke through all this malice: the love and veneration which his honest zeal has justly created, have enabled him to produce the proofs which are filed in court; but many have hung back, and one

Secretary to the Directors, and first or confidential clerk to the Admiralty, charged by Captain Baillie with reducing the pensioners' wards for the accommodation of himself and his footmen.

† One of the chaplains and a director of the hospital, and chaplain to the first Lord of the Admiralty.

In applying for a rule for a criminal information, the evidence pro and con. is sustained by affidavits which the court cannot compel any person to make; whereas, in the case of indictments, the personal attendance of the witnesses to give their evidence viva voce before the grand jury may be compelled by subpœna.