Proposals

In May 1763, Lord Temple (a friend of John Wilkes) purportedly authored a long letter to
the British Secretary of State, Lord Halifax, regarding the legality of seizing private papers.
Temple suggested that the remedy for illegal seizures of papers was the same for illegal
extractions of oral statements: exclusion from criminal court evidence. Temple suggested
that any precedents purporting to hold otherwise were rendered under despotic regimes
such as those of the Stuarts.

When a person is brought upon his trial for any offence, he is not bound, nor
will any court suffer him to give evidence against himself: but by this
method, if allowed, though a man's tongue is not permitted to bear
testimony against him, his thoughts are to rise in judgment, and to be
produced as witnesses to prove the charge. A man's WRITINGS lying in his
closet, NOT PUBLISHED, are no more than his thoughts, hardly brought forth
even in his own account, and, to all the rest of the world, the same as if they
yet remained in embrio in his breast. When a man's WHOLE PAPERs are
seized, he is at the mercy of his prosecutors.

"The rack itself is hardly a more inhuman mode of accusation, or tyrannical
method of proof. Both are equally against the first laws of nature; and
nothing can be more unlike the spirit of our happy constitution."

"But if the partitions of a man's closet (which is but another bosom) are to be
. . . exposed at the humour or malice of every . . . justice of peace, . . . [it would
mean the] END of LIBERTY . . . [and] a FATAL BLOW [against] the most
precious and valuable rights of mankind."

Table 4. U.S. Library Holdings of A Letter to the Right Honourable the Earls of
Egremont and Halifax, His Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State, on the
seizure of papers

Brown University, Providence, RI, John Hay Library DA507 1763 .L4
Brown U, John Carter Brown Lib ESTC lists this, but search of card catalog doesn't
show it. Call (401) 863-1263
Buffalo & Eerie County Hist. Society Library #1 Sev. DA 500 .A46 R48 1763]
California State Library-Sutro 347.93 T747 Bound with: A defence of the minority in
the House of Commons / Charles Townsend. London, 1764
Cincinnati Historical Society R.B. 942.07 R454, 1763
Columbia U Rare Book Library PAMPHLET 942.07 Z111
Cornell U Rare Book Library DA507 .Z45
Cornell U Rare book #2 Bound w/Father of candor and other pamphlets Visited 1/7/10

(Continued)

Folger-Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. Deck C-Rare Stacks
Call Number: 134- 666.4q
Bound with "The Right Honourable annuitant vindicated." The second
edition. (London, 1761) bookplate of Baron Calthorpe, English politician
Harvard U Houghton
Harvard U Law Lib
Huntington Collections, California
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. AC901 .M5 vol. 105 no. 5 Misc Pam

Newberry Library, Chicago
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Indiana U Lilly Library
U of California, Berkeley
U of Chicago
U of Kansas
U of Missouri
U of Texas
Yale #1 Beinecke Library Brit Tracts 1763 L575
Yale #2, Beinecke College Pamphlets 372
Yale #3, Beinecke College Pamphlets 559
Yale #4, Beinecke College Pamphlets 1048

Yale #5
SML, Franklin Collection, Room 230 (Non-Circulating)

Call # 763L7
Yale #6, Lewis Walpole Library 63 763 L56
Yale #7 Lewis Walpole Library 49 1609 6:8