George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

But such is not the tenor of our laws, and accordingly the progress of the temperance reformation, from its beginning to the present moment, has been sustained and energized by the exposure of facts. Neither is there any interdiction in the law as to their relation, whether in statistics or the story of a dream. It is as lawful as it is equitable to refer to actual occurrences and living individuals in illustration of important moral truth. I may even describe a fictitious abandoned character, and in that description I may interweave features that belong to some living man, and scenes transacted by living witnesses, and provided the actual occurrences are not introduced to fasten the fictitious descriptions, and give them a personal realization, but to illustrate and give energy and zest to truth through the medium of fiction, there can be no libel, whoever may see fit to claim ownership for the application of the piece.

But it is said that an essential part of a libel is its tendency to bring a man's character into scorn, and that the result of the dream concerning Deacon Giles' Distillery proves that such was the tendency of that article. Here it may be fairly argued that it is not the article, but the efforts of those who have applied it, and the violent assault upon its author, which have brought about that consequence. The production would never have been applied as it has, had not Deacon Stone and his friends claimed the application, and used it in an effort to raise a sweeping tide of obloquy against its author.

It is a known fact that there is another distillery in this county, of which some of the most material circumstances related in the dream are true. The tendency of the article, therefore, in regard to the owner of that distillery is just as libellous in the abstract as it is in regard to the owner of this; and if he too should see fit to claim the application, and the newspapers should take it up, and the community become passionate, and the foreman of the distillery proceed forthwith to another assault, and another prosecution be commenced for libel, the consequences in the wide-spread notoriety of the application would become the same as in the present instance.

In such a case it is surely unfair to judge of the tendency of the publication by its result; still more unfair to charge that result to the intention of its writer. You may as well say that he intended to produce a vicious excitement in the community, to stir the passions of men to madness, and to bring about a ferocious attack upon his own person. You might almost as well say that the man who built Tenterden Steeple intended to produce Goodwin Sands. It is an injustice not unlike that, with which the assailants of the sin of slavery have been accused as the intentional cause of mobs and riots. On this ground you may rightfully charge upon the first preachers of the gospel the frequent wrath and commotions of the idolatrous populace. On this ground Paul himself would be chargeable with intending the day's great uproar concerning Diana of the Ephesians.