t solemn
manner, that Mr. Otis's Oration against Writs of Assistance breathed
into this nation the breath of life."[2]

In 1765 Mr. Adams laid before the public, anonymously, a series of
essays, afterwards collected in a volume in London, under the title of
"A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law."[3] 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
monarchical and aristocratical 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 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, divine right, to that
most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and
conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and
trustees for 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 abler 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
become extensively known throughout the Province,