negotiable from one officer to another; and so your honors have no opportunity of judging the persons to whom this vast power is delegated. Another instance is this: Mr. Justice Walley had called this same Mr. Ware before him, by a constable, to answer for a breach of the Sabbath day acts, or that of profane swearing. As soon as he had finished, Mr. Ware asked him if he had done. He replied: "Yes." "Well then," said Mr. Ware, "I will show you a little of my power. I command you to permit me to search your house for uncustomed goods"; and went on to search the house from the garret to the cellar, and then served the constable in the same manner! But to show another absurdity in this writ, if it should be established, I insist upon it that every person, by the 14th Charles II., has this power as well as the custom house officers. The words are: "It shall be lawful for any person or persons authorized," etc. What a scene does this open! Every man prompted by revenge, ill-humor, or wantonness, to inspect the inside of his neighbor's house, may get a writ of assistance. Others will ask it from self-defence; one arbitrary exertion will provoke another, until society be involved in tumult and in blood.

[John Adams says that after this exordium Otis continued under four several headings which he gives thus-taking the exordium as the first:]

2. "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 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 tram. ple it underfoot 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 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 be 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 hypocrisy.

5. "He then examined the acts of trade, one by one, and demonstrated that if they were considered as revenue laws, they destroyed all our security of property, liberty, and life, every right of nature, and the English Constitution, and the charter of the province. Here he considered the distinction between 'external and internal taxes,' at that time a popu lar and commonplace distinction. But he asserted that there was no such distinction in theory, or upon any principle but

'necessity.' The necessity that the commerce of the empire should be under one direction was obvious. The Americans had been so sensible of this necessity, that they had connived at the distinction between external and internal taxes, and had submitted to the acts of trade as regulations of commerce, but never as taxations, or revenue laws. Nor had the British Government till now ever dared to attempt to enforce them as taxations or revenue laws. They had lain dormant in that character for a century almost. The Navigation Act he allowed to be binding upon us, because we had consented to it by our own legislature. Here he gave a history of the Navigation Act of the 1st of Charles II., a. plagiarism from Oliver Cromwell. This act had lain dormant for fifteen years. In 1675, after repeated letters and orders from the king, Governor Leverett very candidly informs his Majesty that the law had not been executed, because it was thought unconstitutional, Parliament not having authority over us."

WASHINGTON

GEORGE WASHINGTON was born in Westmoreland, Virginia, on February 22, 1732. His great-grandfather, John Washington, settled in Virginia about 1657. John's eldest son, Lawrence, had three children, of whom Augustine was the second son. Augustine Washington married twice; by the first marriage with Jane Butler there were four children; by the second marriage with Mary Ball in 1730, there were six children, of whom George was the oldest. The father died when George was but twelve years old. The boy's education was but elementary and very defective, except in mathematics wherein he was largely self-taught. A commission as midshipman in the Royal Navy was obtained for him through Admiral Vernon, but owing to the opposition of the boy's mother, it was not accepted. At the age of sixteen, however, George secured the appointment as surveyor of the enormous property of Lord Fairfax, and the next three years of his life were spent in this employment. At the age of nineteen he was appointed adjutant of the Virginia troops with the rank of Major, and in 1753, though he had barely attained his majority, he was made commander of the northern military district of Virginia by the Lieutenant-Governor, Dinwiddie. On the outbreak of the French and Indian War, he was sent to warn the French away from their new forts in Pennsylvania, and his vigorous defence of Fort Necessity made him so conspicuous a figure, that in 1755 he was commissioned Commander-in-Chief of all the Virginia forces. He served in Braddock's campaign, and, though he exposed himself with the utmost recklessness, brought the little remnant of his Virginians out of action in fair order. For a year or two his task was that of defending a frontier of more than 350 miles with 700 men, but in 1758 he commanded the advance guard of the expedition which captured Fort Duquesne. The war in Virginia being then at an end, he resigned his command, married Mrs. Custis, a rich widow, and settled at Mount Vernon, a plantation which he had inherited after the death of his half-brother, Lawrence. For the next twenty years Washington's life was that of a typical Virginia planter. Like others of the dominant caste in Virginia, he was repeatedly elected to the Legislature, but he is not known to have made any set speeches in that body. He took, however, a leading, if a silent part in the struggles of the House of Burgesses against Governor Dunmore. In 1774 the Virginia Convention appointed Washington one of its seven delegates to the Continental Congress. When that body, after the fights at Lexington and Concord, resolved to put the colonies into a state of defence, the first practical step was the unanimous selection, on motion of John Adams of Massachusetts, of Washington as Commander-in-Chief. He reached Cambridge, on July 2,