George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

It is not true that every publication, which tends to individual reproach or ridicule, is therefore essentially libellous. If the result to which the publication tends in respect to any individual was not the object in new, but merely a consequence of the relation or description of the truth, put forth without injurious intention, then there is no libel. The description of a mob in Boston might be highly disreputable to any respectable individuals, who really formed a part of it; but even if their names should be printed in connection with the description, though the truth of the publication would make it disgraceful, its disgraceful tendency could not make it libellous.

Let us suppose the case of an item published in the newspapers, founded on the circumstance of the intoxication of the keeper of a groggery. Let it be as follows, entitled The Doctor caught a-taking of his own medicine.—One day last week, somewhere between the rising and the setting sun, a gentleman, who keeps an extensive establishment, not a hundred miles from Sober Lane, for the accommodation of that large and respectable class of the community sometimes known by the appellation of hard drinkers, was seen humorously reeling from his own door, and after proceeding a few rods up the street, fell down in the midst of it. He was carried home almost in a state of insensibility, and notwithstanding the utmost attention to his case, a very serious mortification ensued. It is supposed he had unfortunately drank a tumbler of the poison in which he deals for purposes connected with chemistry and the arts. This is one of the most melancholy instances it has fallen to our lot to record, in which an individual's public spirit h^as injured his private and personal good.

Now such a description as this, though in no small degree disgraceful to the plaintiff, could not be made a libel, provided it were proved that he was seen under those circumstances in a state of intoxication. In this case the old maxim would hardly hold good, the greater the 'truth, the greater the libel; but, the greater the truth, the more important to be told, that the mark of indelible disgrace might be fixed upon that man's occupation.

The law of libel was never made for the protection of men's sins or immoral practices. If any man's conduct or employment exposes him to censure, he alone must bear it. Disgrace is the inevitable tax that every man pays to society, who chooses to make his living out of other men's sins. It is not the piece in the Landmark which would injure any man's character, because of some circumstances that are true in his case; it is his own employment, if he be a distiller, that injures his character; and if, along with this, he is the treasurer of a Bible Society, and sells Bibles from the distillery, then the whole world feel the inconsistency; and whoever should advert to this fact, or whatever the cause might be which should draw attention to it, it could not but be regarded as reproachful. But it is not reproachful to be the treasurer of a Bible Society. It is a reproach to any man to be a distiller. And the union of these offices is an absurdity so glaring, that I run no risk in saying that if it had been painted as the sign-board over any man's distillery in America, it would have been regarded as an outrage upon common decency.