Other parliamentary proceedings of this session deserve mention.  While the Commons were busily engaged in the great work of restoring the finances, an incident took place which seemed, during a short time, likely to be fatal to the infant liberty of the press, but which eventually proved the means of confirming that liberty.  Among the many newspapers which had been established since the expiration of the censorship, was one called the Flying Post.  The editor, John Salisbury, was the tool of a band of stockjobbers in the City, whose interest it happened to be to cry down the public securities.  He one day published a false and malicious paragraph, evidently intended to throw suspicion on the Exchequer Bills.  On the credit of the Exchequer Bills depended, at that moment, the political greatness and the commercial prosperity of the realm.  The House of Commons was in a flame.  The Speaker issued his warrant against Salisbury.  It was resolved without a division that a bill should be brought in to prohibit the publishing of news without a license.  Forty-eight hours later the bill was presented and read.  But the members had now had time to cool.  There was scarcely one of them whose residence in the country had not, during the preceding summer, been made more agreeable by the London journals.  Meagre as those journals may seem to a person who has the Times daily on his breakfast table, they were to that generation a new and abundant source of pleasure.  No Devonshire or Yorkshire gentleman, Whig or Tory, could bear the thought of being again dependent, during seven months of every year, for all information about what was doing in the world, on newsletters.  If the bill passed, the sheets, which were now so impatiently expected twice a week at every country seat in the kingdom, would contain nothing but what it suited the Secretary of State to make public; they would be, in fact, so many London Gazettes; and the most assiduous reader of the London Gazette might be utterly ignorant of the most important events of his time.  A few voices, however, were raised in favour of a censorship.  “These papers,” it was said, “frequently contain mischievous matter.”  “Then why are they not prosecuted?” was the answer.  “Has the Attorney-General filed an information against any one of them?  And is it not absurd to ask us to give a new remedy by statute, when the old remedy afforded by the common law has never been tried?” On the question whether the bill should be read a second time, the Ayes were only sixteen, the Noes two hundred.787

Another bill, which fared better, ought to be noticed as an instance of the slow, but steady progress of civilisation.  The ancient immunities enjoyed by some districts of the capital, of which the largest and the most infamous was Whitefriars, had produced abuses which could no longer be endured.  The Templars on one side of Alsatia, and the citizens on the other, had long been calling on the government and the legislature