This is an exact copy of the article in No. 3 of the _Prompter_ which was selected for indictment, and which, with a little rough handling of the jury, ended in giving Carlile three years' imprisonment in the Giltspur Street Compter:--
"A list of officers in the King's Household is the most ludicrous and ridiculous thing that can be read. It will not bear mention in the present day, and is of itself an evidence that a constitutional monarchy is a most ridiculous state of government. More than mimicking absolute monarchy and perpetuating all ancient follies and abuses, everything conspires against a king to tell him that he is something more than human, and all that sort of flattery is calculated to unman him and to make him less than a man! We want no mummeries and nonsense wherewith to please savages and fools in the present day. We want public officers who shall really be men of business. We want laboring men to carry on the affairs of government, who shall be paid for their labor and their labor only. Let us see what the Whigs will do to make their constitutional monarchy appear decent to the brightening eye of the public."
The Whigs were supposed to be the Liberal party as opposed to the Tories, and what they did was to immediately proceed against this article and the following, and clap Carlile into prison with heavy fines and sureties:--
"To the Insurgent and Agricultural Laborers--
"You are much to be admired for everything you are known to have done during the last month, for as yet there is no evidence before the public that you are incendiaries or even political rebels. Much as every thoughtful man must lament the waste of property, much as he country must suffer by the burning of the farm produce now going on, were you proved to be the incendiaries we should defend you by saying that you have more just and moral cause for it than any king or faction that ever made war had for making war. In war all destruction of property is counted lawful. Upon the ground of that which is called the law of nations, yours is a state of warfare, and your quarrel is the want of the necessaries of life in the midst of abundance. You see hoards of food and you are starving you see a Government rioting in every sort of luxury and wasteful expenditure, and you, ever ready to labor, cannot find one of the comforts of life. Neither your silence nor your patience has obtained for you the least respectful attention from that Government. The more tame you have grown the more you have been oppressed and despised, the more you have been trampled on; and it is only now that you begin to display your physical as well as your moral strength that your cruel tyrants treat with you and offer terms of pacification. Your demands have so far been moderate and just, and any attempt to stifle them by the threatened severity of the new Administration will be so wicked as to justify your resistance even to death and to life for life. Persevere in your moderate and just demands! Go on as you have begun, and learn--not only in precept, but in your own example--that great political sentiment of Thomas Paine, the greatest political friend of the laboring man that ever put pen to paper for his instruction, that _For a nation to be free it is sufficient that she wills it!_"