its important effects. "I do say," he observes, "in the most solemn
manner, that Mr. Otis's Oration against Writs of Assistance breathed
into this nation the breath of life."

In 1765 Mr. Adams laid before the public, what I suppose to be his
first printed performance, except essays for the periodical press, A
Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law. The object of this work was to
show that our New England ancestors, in, consenting to exile themselves
from their native land, were actuated mainly by the desire of delivering
themselves from the power of the hierarchy, and from the monarchial and
aristocratical political systems of the other continent, and to make
this truth bear with effect on the politics of the times. Its tone is
uncommonly bold and animated for that period. He calls on the people,
not only to defend, but to study and understand, their rights and
privileges; urges earnestly the necessity of diffusing general
knowledge; invokes the clergy and the bar, the colleges and academies,
and all others who have the ability and the means to expose the
insidious designs of arbitrary power, to resist its approaches, and to
be persuaded that there is a settled design on foot to enslave all
America. "Be it remembered," says the author, "that liberty must, at all
hazards, be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker.
But if we had not, our fathers have earned it and bought it for us, at
the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their
blood. And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among
the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to
knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given
them understandings and a desire to know. But, besides this, they have a
right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible right, to that most
dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the character and
conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and
trustees of the people and if the cause, the interest and trust, is
insidiously betrayed or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right
to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed, and to
constitute other and better agents, attorneys, and trustees."

The citizens of this town conferred on Mr. Adams his first political
distinction, and clothed him with his first political trust, by electing
him one of their representatives in 1770. Before this time he had b