the law itself is sufficient to animadvert upon it with great severity.  Nothing indeed can hinder that severe letter from crushing us, except the temperaments it may receive from a trial by jury.  But if the habit prevails of going beyond the law, and superseding this judicature, of carrying offences, real or supposed, into the legislative bodies, who shall establish themselves into courts of criminal equity (so the Star Chamber has been called by Lord Bacon), all the evils of the Star Chamber are revived.  A large and liberal construction in ascertaining offences, and a discretionary power in punishing them, is the idea of criminal equity; which is in truth a monster in jurisprudence.  It signifies nothing whether a court for this purpose be a committee of council, or a House of Commons, or a House of Lords; the liberty of the subject will be equally subverted by it.  The true end and purpose of that House of Parliament, which entertains such a jurisdiction, will be destroyed by it.

I will not believe, what no other man living believes, that Mr. Wilkes was punished for the indecency of his publications, or the impiety of his ransacked closet.  If he had fallen in a common slaughter of libellers and blasphemers, I could well believe that nothing more was meant than was pretended.  But when I see, that, for years together, full as impious, and perhaps more dangerous writings to religion, and virtue, and order, have not been punished, nor their authors discountenanced; that the most audacious libels on royal majesty have passed without notice; that the most treasonable invectives against the laws, liberties, and constitution of the country, have not met with the slightest animadversion; I must consider this as a shocking and shameless pretence.  Never did an envenomed scurrility against everything sacred and civil, public and private, rage through the kingdom with such a furious and unbridled license.  All this while the peace of the nation must be shaken, to ruin one libeller, and to tear from the populace a single favorite.

Nor is it that vice merely skulks in an obscure and contemptible impunity.  Does not the public behold with indignation, persons not only generally scandalous in their lives, but the identical persons who, by their society, their instruction, their example, their encouragement, have drawn this man into the very faults which have furnished the cabal with a pretence for his persecution, loaded with every kind of favor, honor, and distinction, which a court can bestow?  Add but the crime of servility (the foedum crimen servitutis) to every other crime, and the whole mass is immediately transmuted into virtue, and becomes the just subject of reward and honor.  When therefore I reflect upon this method pursued by the cabal in distributing rewards and punishments, I must conclude that Mr. Wilkes is the object of persecution, not on account of what he has done in common with others who are the objects of reward, but for that in which he differs from many of them:  that he is pursued for the spirited dispositions which are blended with his vices; for his unconquerable firmness, for his resolute, indefatigable, strenuous resistance against oppression.