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LECTURE X.

THE MARTYRS OF THE REVOLUTION.

N speaking of the martyrs of the Revolution, 1 do not undertake, as you will readily conceive, to speak of all who, in that day of trial, suffered for the truth's sake. A mere catalogue would convey no idea of the peculiar merits of the sufferer or the relative value of the sacrifice. Nor would it be easy to form such a catalogue out of the imperfect materials that accident, full as often as an intelligent appreciation of their importance, has preserved. Thousands die in battle whom history never mentions; and in all great wars thousands are exposed to sufferings worse than death without even a passing allusion in the general record of misery. Here, as elsewhere, all that history can do is to select characteristic names, and by a faithful picture of individuals endeavor to give a general idea of the classes to which they belong. Out of the three hundred and sixteen who served their country in Congress from the first assumption of the powers of government in 1775 to the inauguration of the Federal Constitution in 1789, scarce

thirty are known in the general history of the United States, scarce six in the general history of the world. We had twenty-nine major-generals. How many of them find a place even in the school histories which we put into the hands of our children in order to familiarize them betimes with the characters and the services of their fathers? It seems sad that so many of our benefactors should be forgotten; for it seems like wilfully rejecting the aid which society might derive from that instinctive desire to be remembered by posterity, which nature has implanted in the human heart as one of its strongest incentives to virtue. Here it is that history most needs the aid of her sister arts, of sculpture, and painting, and poetry; whose appeals to the imagination, not confined as hers are by the rigorous laws of evidence, give a life to our conceptions of the past, which, wisely cherished and judiciously directed, seldom fails to exert an important influence upon the future. A noble act embalmed in verse, the form and features of a great man preserved in marble, the characteristic circumstances of a great event illustrated by a skilful pencil, are among the most powerful instruments which God has intrusted to our hands for the direction of individual aspirations, and the moulding of national character.

If this truth had been felt in the United States as it was felt in the republics of antiquity, the public squares of Boston would not still have been

without a statue of James Otis. A century ago no face was more familiar in your streets than his ; no voice so powerful in your courts of justice, in your halls of legislation, and in the gathering places of the people. When Englishmen spoke of the dangerous spirit that was daily growing more dangerous in the Colonies, the first names that came to their lips were the names of Otis and Franklin. When the leaders of sister Colonies wished to strengthen their own hands by the authority of Massachusetts, they appealed to th opinion of Otis as the most faithful expression o' the opinion of his people.

Few men have possessed in a more eminent de gree the qualities required for the successful guid ance of the earlier periods of a struggle like that of our Revolution. He was a sound lawyer; deeply and extensively read; and all the first questions of our controversy were questions of constitutional law. He had read and thought much upon the science of government, and brought a thorough acquaintance with fundamental principles to the discussion of practical questions. He was a close reasoner, a vigorous debater, and in the appeals and apostrophes of oratory, full of an impetuous eloquence that bore down opposition. The enthusiasm that he excited was not a transient feeling, dying away with the sound of his voice, but a profound agitation of the whole nature, penetrating the heart, subduing the reason, and leaving every

where deep traces of its passage when the headlong torrent had rolled away. He had prepared himself for his professional career by adding to the severe discipline of legal study the elegant discipline of polite literature; studying his Greek and Latin classics as he studied his English classics, and making himself as familiar with Homer and Virgil as with Milton and Shakespeare. If Milton suspended the flow of Paradise Lost in order to dictate his "Accidence made Grammar," may we not regard it as a proof of the vigor of Otis's mind that in the midst of the absorbing duties of his profession he found leisure to compile treatises on Greek and Latin prosody? High-minded, impetuous, irascible; with his political opponents haughty and overbearing, he was generous, sincere, placable, incapable of artifice or deceit; not a pure intellect, moving only in the light of reason and warming only in the pursuit of abstract truths, but a fervid mind, glowing with the sympathetic warmth of a kindred heart.

His labors belong to the first phase of the contest, and filling eight years of his active life, give him, in America, the place of defender of the constitutional rights of the Colonies against the encroachments of the Ministry and Parliament. He was the first to assert that taxation without representation was tyranny; but his defence was strictly constitu

*

*The expression had been used long before; Otis was the first to revive and apply it.

tional and fervently loyal; and although he may have foreseen that independence, in certain contin gencies, must be the logical consequence of his doctrines, he could not foresee that contingencies so easily avoided would so speedily occur. His speech in 1761, against Writs of Assistance, marks an epoch in Colonial history; for it was the beginning of a form of legal resistance equally adapted to the nature of the dispute and the character of the people who were to sustain it. From that moment he became the acknowledged leader of the opposition: looked up to by his fellow-citizens as the champion of their rights; looked down upon by the Ministry as factious, turbulent, and unmanageable. From that moment, too, he devoted himself to public life, gradually withdrawing from his profession and concentrating his energies upon the question which, in his mind, had already assumed the proportions of a contest for freedom. And here, also, began those voluntary sacrifices, that persistent self-denial, which, for a temperament like his, were the first pangs of martyrdom. He resigned the office of Advocate-General, and with it, not merely its pecuniary rewards, but a professional distinction which he valued more than money. He placed himself in open opposition to some of his dearest friends, and voluntarily renounced many of the associations which were most necessary to his social nature. He made bitter enemies at home and abroad, and drew upon himself the calumnies and

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