England; consequently, in a short time, they will be far more numerous than the people of that country. Consider this, and you will find this State more particularly interested to support American liberty and not bind our posterity by an improvident relinquishment of our rights. I would give the best security for a punctual compliance with requisitions; but I beseech gentlemen, at all hazards, not to give up this unlimited power of taxation. The honorable gentleman has told us. .t these powers, given to Congress, are accompanied by a judiciary which will correct all. On examination, you will find this very judiciary oppressively constructed, your jury trial destroyed, and the judges dependent on Congress.

This Constitution is said to have beautiful features; but when I come to examine these features, sir, they appear to me horribly frightful. Among other deformities, it has an awful squinting; it squints toward monarchy; and does not this raise indignation in the breast of every true American? Your President may easily become king. Your Senate is so imperfectly constructed that your dearest rights may be sacrificed by what may be a small minority; and a very small minority may continue forever unchangeably this government, although horridly defective. Where are your checks in this government? Your strongholds will be in the hands of your enemies. It is on a supposition that your American governors shall be honest, that all the good qualities of this government are founded; but its defective and imperfect construction puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs, should they be bad men; and, sir, would not all the world, from the Eastern to the Western Hemisphere, blame our distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or

bad? Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty! I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed, with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt.

If your American chief be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute! The army is in his hands, and if he be a man of address, it will be attached to him, and it will be the subject of long meditation with him to seize the first auspicious moment to accomplish his design; and, sir, will the American spirit solely relieve you when this happens? I would rather infinitely— and I am sure most of this Convention are of the same opinion—have a king, lords, and commons, than a government so replete with such insupportable evils. If we make a king, we may prescribe the rules by which he shall rule his people, and interpose such checks as shall prevent him from infringing them; but the President, in the field, at the head of his army, can prescribe the terms on which he shall reign master, so far that it will puzzle any American ever to get his neck from under the galling yoke. I cannot with patience think of this idea. If ever he violate the laws, one of two things will happen; he will come at the head of the army to carry everything before him; or he will give bail, or do what Mr. Chief-Justice will order him. If he be guilty, will not the recollection of his crimes teach him to make one bold push for the American throne? Will not the immense difference between being master of everything and being ignominiously tried and punished powerfully excite him to make this bold push? But, sir, where is the existing force to punish him? Can he not, at the head of

his army, beat down every opposition? Away with your President! we shall have a king: the army will salute him monarch; your militia will leave you, and assist in making him king, and fight against you: and what have you to oppose this force? What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue?

SAMUEL ADAMS

SAMUEL ADAMS, a second cousin of John Adams, was born at Boston, September 27, 1742. He entered Harvard College, but, owing to his father's failure in business, had to leave before completing his course. He received a B.A. degree, however, and it is an interesting fact that his thesis was a defence of the affirmative reply to the question, "Whether it be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved." After an unsuccessful attempt to make a living in trade, he became the tax collector for the City of Boston, whence he was called by his political opponents "Samuel the Publican.' Throughout the movement, of which the Declaration of Independence was to be the outcome, Adams was a conspicuous actor. He took part in numerous town meetings; drafted the protest which was sent up by Boston against Grenville's taxation scheme in May, 1764, and, being chosen in the following year a member of the Massachusetts General Court, he soon became a leader in debate. Subsequently, having received the appointment of clerk of the House, he exercised much influence in the arrangement of the order of business and in the framing of State papers. He is generally credited with the invention of the "caucus," and the importance of his opposition to the British Government is attested by the fact that he was specially excepted from General Gage's amnesty proclamation on June, 1775, on the ground that he had "committed offences of too flagitious a nature to admit of any other consideration than that of condign punishment. Samuel Adams was one of the delegates from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, and he signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He was a member of the convention which settled the State Constitution of Massachusetts, and became President of its Senate. From 1789 to 1794 he was Lieu. tenant-Governor of the State, and Governor from the last named year to 1797; then retiring partly on account of age and partly because the Federalists were in the ascendant, while he himself was inclined to the Jeffersonian or Republican party. He died on the 3d of October, 1803. It was Samuel Adams who in an oration on American independence, delivered in Philadelphia on the 1st of August, 1776, described the English as "a nation of shopkeepers." The oration was translated into French and published in Paris, and it is therefore not unlikely that Napoleon borrowed the phrase from Adams.

AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

Countrymen and Brethren:

I

WOULD gladly have declined an honor to which I find myself unequal. I have not the calmness and impar

tiality which the infinite importance of this occasion demands. I will not deny the charge of my enemies, that resentment for the accumulated injuries of our country, and an ardor for her glory, rising to enthusiasm, may deprive me of that accuracy of judgment and expression which men of cooler passions may possess. Let me beseech you, then, to hear me with caution, to examine your prejudice, and to correct the mistakes into which I may be hurried by my zeal.

Truth loves an appeal to the common-sense of mankind. Your unperverted understandings can best determine on subjects of a practical nature. The positions and plans which are said to be above the comprehension of the multitude may be always suspected to be visionary and fruitless. He who made all men hath made the truths necessary to human happiness obvious to all.

Our forefathers threw off the yoke of Popery in religion; for you is reserved the honor of levelling the popery of politics. They opened the Bible to all, and maintained the capacity of every man to judge for himself in religion. Are we sufficient for the comprehension of the sublimest spiritual truths, and unequal to material and temporal ones?

Heaven hath trusted us with the management of things for eternity, and man denies us ability to judge of the present, or to know from our feelings the experience that will