life. Writs of assistance, which allowed officials to
search everywhere for smuggled goods, were duly legalised. These writs
were the logical sequence of a rigid enforcement of the laws of trade
and navigation, and had been vehemently denounced by James Otis, so far
back as 1761, as not only irreconcilable with the colonial charters, but
as inconsistent with those natural rights which a people "derived from
nature and the Author of nature"--an assertion which obtained great
prominence for the speaker. This bold expression of opinion in
Massachusetts should be studied by the historian of those times in
connection with the equally emphatic revolutionary argument advanced by
Patrick Henry of Virginia, two years later, against the ecclesiastical
supremacy of the Anglican clergy and the right of the king to veto
legislation of the colony. Though the prerogative of the crown was thus
directly called into question in a Virginia court, the British
government did not take a determined stand on the undoubted rights of
the crown in the case. English statesmen and lawyers probably regarded
such arguments, if they paid any attention to them at all in days when
they neglected colonial opinion, as only temporary ebullitions of local
feeling, though in reality they were so many evidences of the opposition
that was sure to show itself whenever there was a direct interference
with the privileges and rights of self-governing communities. Both Henry
and Otis touched a key-note of the revolution, which was stimulated by
the revenue and stamp acts and later measures affecting the colonies.

It is somewhat remarkable that it was in aristocratic Virginia, founded
by Cavaliers, as well as in democratic Massachusetts, founded by
Puritans, that the revolutionary element gained its principal strength
during the controversy with the parent state. The makers of
Massachusetts were independents in church government and democrats in
political principle. The whole history of New England, in fact, from the
first charters until the argument on the writs of assistance, is full of
incidents which show the growth of republican ideas. The Anglican church
had no strength in the northern colonies, and the great majority of
their people were bitterly opposed to the pretensions of the English
hierarchy to establish an episcopate in America. It is not therefore
surprising that Massachusetts should have been the leader in the
revolutionary agitation; on the other h