And on this part of the question the general judgment has, we think, been unfavorable to the government; and it has been commonly allowed that the Chancellor, whose advice on legal subjects the Prime-minister naturally took for his guide, gave him impolitic counsel.

In fact, it is well known that these two acts, to a great extent, failed in their object through their excessive severity, several juries having refused to convict persons who were prosecuted for treason, who would certainly not have escaped had they only been indicted for sedition; and it is deserving of remark that these two bills were not regarded with favor by the King himself, if the anecdote--which seems to rest on undeniable authority--be true, that he expressed satisfaction at the acquittal of some prisoners, on the ground that almost any evil would be more tolerable than that of putting men to death "for constructive treason." It must therefore, probably, be affirmed that these two acts, the Treason Act and the Seditious Meetings Act, went beyond the necessity of the case; that they were not only violations of the constitution--which, when the measures are temporary, as these were, are not always indefensible--but that they were superfluous, unjust, and impolitic; superfluous, when they proposed to deal with acts already visitable with punishment by the ancient laws of the kingdom; unjust, when they created new classes of offences; and impolitic, as exciting that kind of disapproval of the acts of government which in many minds has a tendency to excite a spirit of discontent with and resistance to legitimate authority.

And, indeed, it must be inferred that such was the light in which these measures were regarded by a statesman who in his general policy was proud to acknowledge himself Mr.Pitt's pupil, as he was also the most skilful and successful of his more immediate successors.

Twenty-five years afterward the distress caused by the reaction inevitably consequent on the termination of twenty years of war produced a political excitement scarcely inferior to that with which Pitt had now to deal, and seditious societies and meetings scarcely less formidable; but, as we shall see, Lord Liverpool, taking warning, perhaps, from the mistake into which Mr.
Pitt was led on this occasion, though compelled to bring forward new and stern measures of repression, and even to suspend the _Habeas Corpus_ Act for a time, kept strictly within the lines of constitutional precedent, and was careful to avoid confounding sedition with treason.
Notes: [Footnote 73: He had been Lord-chamberlain in Lord Rockingham's administration of 1765.

He was now Lord-lieutenant of Ireland.] [Footnote 74: In Lord Chatham's or the Duke of Grafton's ministry of 1766, and in the later administration of Lord Rockingham.] [Footnote 75: It may be convenient to take this opportunity of pointing out that, in this administration, Lord Shelburne altered the old, most unreasonable, and inconvenient arrangement by which the departments of the two Secretaries of State were distinguished by the latitude, and called Northern and Southern.