The trial was continued at intervals for over seven years.  It resulted in the acquittal of the accused (1795); but it was proved that the chief business of those who went out to India was to wring fortunes from the natives, and then go back to England to live like “nabobs,” and spend their ill-gotten money in a life of luxury.  This fact, and the stupendous corruption that was shown to exist, eventually broke down the gigantic monopoly, and British India was thrown open to the trade of all nations.[1]

[1] See Macaulay’s “Essay on Warren Hastings”; also Burke’s “Speeches.”

556.  Liberty of the Press; Law and Prison Reforms; Abolition of the
     Slave Trade.

Since the discontinuance of the censorship of the press (S498), though newspapers were nominally free to discuss public affairs, yet the Government had no intention of permitting any severe criticism.  On the other hand, there were men who were determined to speak their minds through the press on political as on all other matters.  In the early part of the reign, John Wilkes, an able but scurrilous writer, attacked the policy of the Crown in violent terms (1763).  Some years later (1769), a writer, who signed himself “Junius,” began a series of letters in a daily paper, in which he handled the King and the “King’s friends” still more roughly.  An attempt was made by the Government to punish Wilkes and the publisher of the “Junius” letters, but it signally failed in both cases.  Public feeling was plainly in favor of the freest political expression,[2] which was eventually conceded.

[2] Later, during the excitement caused by the French Revolution, there was a reaction from this feeling, but it was only temporary.

Up to this time parliamentary debates had rarely been reported.  In fact, under the Tudors and the Stuarts, members of Parliament would have run the risk of imprisonment if their criticisms of royalty had been made public; but now, in 1771, the papers began to contain the speeches and votes of both Houses on important questions.  Every effort was made to suppress these reports, but again the press gained the day.  Henceforth the nation could learn how far its representatives really represented the will of the people, and so could hold them strictly accountable,—­a matter of vital importance in every free government.[3]

[3] See Summary of Constitutional History in the Appendix, p. xxvi, S30.

Another field of reform was also found.  The times were brutal.  The pillory still stood in the center of London;[4] and if the unfortunate offender who was put in it escaped with a shower of mud and other unsavory missiles, instead of clubs and brickbats, he was lucky indeed.  Gentlemen of fashion arranged pleasure parties to visit the penitentiaries for women to see the wretched inmates whipped.  The whole code of criminal law was savagely vindictive.  Capital punishment was inflicted for about two hundred offenses, many of which would now be thought to be sufficiently punished by one or two months’ imprisonment in the house of correction.