The circulation of compositions thus manipulated
might be to some extent surreptitious and secret. But such a mode of
proceeding was necessarily confined to few. The ordinary writer must
have had recourse to a professional publisher, who undertook, as a
tradesman, to present his work for profit to the world. Upon these
agents the government might have had all the hold it required: yet it
never demanded the sight beforehand of any speech, essay, or satire
which was advertised as about to appear. It was still content to punish
after publication what it deemed to be censurable excesses. Severe and
arbitrary as some of its proceedings were in this respect,... it must
be allowed that these prosecutions of written works were rare and
exceptional, and that the traces we discover of the freedom of letters,
even under the worst of the Emperors, leave on the whole a strong
impression of the general leniency of their policy in this
particular."[A] This correct picture of the policy of Imperial Rome on
this point shows that the ancient sovereigns of the first of empires
were more liberal than are modern rulers of their class, and that the
Caesars scorned to do that which has been common with the Bonapartes.
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