The secret design of all these entangling edicts was to hold the printers in passive obedience to the government, whatever that government might be; for each separate government, though acting on opposite principles, manifested a remarkable uniformity in their proceedings with the press. In the arbitrary days of Charles the Second, an extraordinary, if not an audacious, attempt was made to wrest the art of printing out of the hands of its professors, and to place the press wholly at the disposal of the sovereign. This usurping doctrine was founded on a startling plea. As our monarchs had granted privileges to the earliest printers, and, from the introduction of the art into England, had never ceased their patronage or their control, it was inferred, that our kings had never yielded the royal prerogative of printing any more than they had that of coining. The “mystery” of printing, in the style of the lawyers, was “a flower of the crown!”—the exercise of the prerogative; and therefore every printer in England must be a sworn servant of the crown. At such a period we are not surprised to find an express treatise put forth to demonstrate to his sacred majesty, that “printing belonged to him, in his public and private capacity, as supreme magistrate and as proprietor;” in reality there was to be but one printer for all England, and that printer the king! This was giving at once the most elevated and the most degraded notions of “the divine art,” which this servile assumer describes can “not only bereave the king of his good name, but of the very hearts of his people.”[16]
We observe the lamentations of these advocates of arbitrary power over the freedom of the press, or, as such maintained, the confusion produced “by the exorbitant and unlawful exercise of printing in modern times.” They appeal to the miseries and calamities not only recently witnessed in our own country, but in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Wherever they track a footstep of the liberty of the press, they pause to discover its accompanying calamity. One of these writers, to convey an adequate notion of the spread and political influence of the press, has thrown out a very excitable remark:—“Had this art been known in the time of the grand profession of the Donatist and Arian heresy, it would have drowned the world in a second deluge of blood and confusion, to its utter destruction long time since.” A stroke of church history which might suggest a whole volume!
The interests of the printers had coincided with the designs of government, in limiting the number of presses; for the policy of their narrow confederacy was, the fewer printers the more printing! But the interests of the booksellers were quite opposite; they were for encouraging supernumerary printers, and overstocking the printing-offices with journeymen, and by this means they succeeded in bringing the printers down to their price or their purpose; and it is insinuated, on the Machiavelian principle, that the number being greater than could live honestly by the trade, one-half must be knaves, or starve. And it seems that “knaves” were in greater requisition by the publishers of “the unlawful,” or, as these were afterwards called on the establishment of a licenser of the press, “the unlicensed books,” who revelled in their seductive profits.[17]
Among the effusions of the political Literature of the egregious Sir Roger L’Estrange, versed in the arcana of the publishing system of his day, I discover a project which terminated in renewing the office of the Licenser of Books, in his own person; the only pitiful preferment the Restoration brought the clamorous Loyalist. Our literary knight addressed Charles the Second, to impress on his Majesty the urgency of an immediate regulation of the press; “this great business of the press being now engrossed by Oliver’s creatures, and the honest printers being impoverished by the late times.”
This project to regulate the press by L’Estrange, chiefly turned on the dexterous management of the printers. He calculated, for four thousand pounds, to buy up the presses of the poor printers, who were willing to be reimbursed, and look to better trades. The bolder project was to emancipate the printers from the tyranny of the booksellers, by which means they would no longer be necessitated to print whatever their masters ordered. The printers at this moment had menaced to separate themselves from the stationers, with a view of their own.
The printers had been gradually deprived of any shares in new publications; they had been thrown out of all copyright, and probably had grown somewhat jealous of their prosperous masters; the printers complained that they were nothing else than slaves to the booksellers. They called for an independent company of “the mystery,” and reverting to the custom of the early printers, they desired to have their own presses under their own management, and to print only the copies of which they themselves were the proprietors.
The future licenser of the press, who was throwing his net to haul in all these fish at a cast, took advantage of this project, which at once was levelled at the freedom of the trade, and the freedom of the press. Printers solely working on their own copies, would indeed check “the ungovernable ambition of the booksellers,” by diminishing their copyrights; while those “unhappy printers” would be relieved, who at present have no other work than what “the great dealers in treasonous or seditious books” furnished them. All these were but the ostensible motives, for the real object designed was that the printers should become the creatures of the patronage of government, and, by the diminution of their number, the contracted circle would be the more easily managed.
Such were the systematic struggles of our governments in the revival of the severe acts for the regulation of printing at various periods. It was long assumed that printing was not a free trade, but always to remain under regulation.
When Dr. Johnson, labouring under the pressure of his ancient notions, contending with the clear perception of his sceptical sagacity, once stood awed before the sublime effusion of Milton’s “Areopagitica,” he hazarded this opinion, for by balancing his notions it cannot be accepted as a decision: “The danger of such unbounded liberty, and the danger of bounding it, have produced a problem in the science of government which human understanding seems unable to solve.”