But Fox’s Libel Act had reached the statute book in the temperate early months of 1792, making the jury the judge of the matter as well as of the fact. It was, perhaps, Fox’s greatest service to the common people, passed at the eleventh hour before the tide turned towards repression.3 Thus, in England, the Government was faced with a series of obstacles: an indefinite law, the jury system (which humiliated authority by twice acquitting Daniel Eaton and by acquitting Thomas Walker in 1794), a small but brilliant Foxite opposition among whose number was the great advocate Thomas Erskine (who led
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