arbitrary exertion will provoke another, until society be involved in tumult and in blood.

[Here ends the only direct report of the speech that remains; but John Adams, who heard the oration, and who said that in it American independence was born, wrote out an abstract of it, which here follows:

1. He began with an exordium, containing an apology for his resignation of the position of Advocate-General in the Court of Admiralty: and for his appearance in that cause in opposition to the Crown and in favor of the town of Boston and the merchants of Boston and Salem.

2. A dissertation on the rights of man in a state of nature. He asserted that every man, merely natural, was an independent sovereign, subject to no law but the law written on his heart and revealed to him by his Maker, in the constitution of his nature, and the inspiration of his understanding and his conscience. His right to his life, his liberty, no created being could rightfully contest. Nor was his right to his property less incontestable. The club that he had snapped from a tree, for a staff or for defence, was his own. His bow and arrow were his own; if by a pebble he had killed a partridge or a squirrel, it was his own. No creature, man or beast, had a right to take it from him. If he had taken an eel, or a smelt, or a sculpin, it was his property. In short, he sported upon this topic with so much wit

and humor, and at the same time with so much indisputable truth and reason, that he was not less entertaining than instructive. He asserted that these rights were inherent and inalienable; that they never could be surrendered or alienated, but by idiots or madmen, and all the acts of idiots and lunatics were void, and not obligatory, by all the laws of God and man. Nor were the poor negroes forgotten. Not a Quaker in Philadelphia, or Mr. Jefferson in Virginia, ever asserted the rights of negroes in stronger terms. Young as I was, and ignorant as I was, I shuddered at the doctrine he taught; and I have all my life shuddered,, and still shudder, at the consequences that may be drawn from such premises. Shall we say that the rights of masters and servants clash, and can be decided only by force? I adore the idea of gradual abolitions! but who shall decide how fast or how slowly these abolitions shall be made?

3. From individual independence he proceeded to association. If it was inconsistent with the dignity of human nature to say that men were gregarious animals, like wild geese, it surely could offend no delicacy to say they were social animals by nature: that there were natural sympathies, and, above all, the sweet attraction of the sexes, which must soon draw them together in little groups, and by degrees in larger congregations, for mutual assistance and defence. And this must have happened before any formal covenant, by express words or signs, was

and ecclesiastical, in every age. He asserted that our ancestors, as British subjects, and we, their descendants, as British subjects, were entitled to all those rights, by the British Constitution, as well as by the law of nature and our provincial charter, as much as any inhabitant of London or Bristol, or any part of England; and were not to De cheated out of them by any phantom of "virtual representation," or any other fiction of law or politics, or any monkish trick of deceit and 1ypocrisy.

5. He then examined the Acts of Trade, one by ɔne, and demonstrated that if they were considered is revenue laws, they destroyed all our security of roperty, liberty, and life, every right of nature, nd the English Constitution, and the charter of the >rovince. Here he considered the distinction beween "external and internal taxes," at that time + popular and commonplace distinction. But he asserted that there was no such distinction in theory, or upon any principle but "necessity." The necesity that the commerce of the empire should be under one direction was obvious. The Americans had been >o sensible of this necessity that they had connived at the distinction between external and internal axes, and had submitted to the Acts of Trade as egulations of commerce, but never as taxations or evenue laws. Nor had the British government till now ever dared to attempt to enforce them as taxa

concluded. When general councils and deliberations commenced, the objects could be no other than the mutual defence and security of every individual for his life, his liberty, and his property. To suppose them to have surrendered these in any other way than by equal rules and general consent was to suppose them idiots or madmen, whose acts were never binding. To suppose them surprised by fraud, or compelled by force into any other compact, such fraud and such force could confer no obligation. Every man had a right to trample it under foot whenever he pleased. In short, he asserted these rights to be derived only from nature and the Author of nature: that they were inherent, inalienable, and indefeasible by any laws, pacts, contracts, covenants, or stipulations which man could devise.

4. These principles and these rights were wrought into the English Constitution as fundamental laws. And under this head he went back to the old Saxon laws, and to Magna Charta, and the fifty confirmations of it in Parliament, and the executions ordained against the violators of it, and the national vengeance which had been taken on them from time to time, down to the Jameses and Charleses, and to the Petition of Right and the Bill of Rights and the Revolution. He asserted that the security of these rights to life, liberty, and property had been the object of all those struggles against arbitrary power, temporal and spiritual, civil and political, military