the rulers of society. This people, from an inattention to government, from first permitting the liberty of the press to be infringed by the adjudications of their courts are at length proscribed from the utterance of ideas derogatory to established customs or the oppressive prerogatives of the crown.[230]

Thus, even the beloved Washington should be criticized, argued Duckett, because even unfounded criticism of good rulers is needed to fight political corruption.  Duckett identified a political pathology that can infect and corrupt good rulers: “blind confidence” of the people in good rulers leads to idolizing rulers, tempting them into self-love, awaking ambition, turning idealists corrupt.  Indeed, suggests Duckett, this path to corruption may be “the natural impulse of the human mind.”  Thus, for good rulers to turn bad, nothing active need be done.  All that is required to open the door to corruption is failure of people to challenge the government. In Duckett’s theory, a free press guards against corruption and tyranny, not only by exposing bad acts by officeholders but also by discouraging any idolatry of elected leaders as well as compelling political leaders to recognize the potential for opposition to any of their actions.  Duckett is one of the first political writers to assert that opposition to the government should be viewed as a structural element of democratic government, so that all elected leaders are continually tested by opposition to prevent aggrandizement of the rulers and servility of the people. Thus, Duckett rejected the British prosecutions for seditious libel, used in Great Britain to stifle similar expressions of opposition to the government.[231]

Levy and other historians have paid scant attention to what Americans wrote about press freedom during the Washington administration.  In surveying the “original understanding” of the press freedom guarantee, Levy does not mention Duckett or the

[230] Id.

[231] Duckett specifically mentioned the seditious libel prosecutions of Thomas Paine and Archibald Rowan, making it crystal clear that it was such prosecutions Duckett meant by infringements on liberty of the press