The summary of this speech can be best, and can now be only given in the words of John Adams, who divides it into five parts:

1. "He began with an exordium, containing an apology for his resignation of the office 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 sculpion, 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

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 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 position of rights 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 character, 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 popular 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

I shall always lament that I did not take a year or two further for more general inquiries in the arts and sciences before I sat down to the laborious study of the laws of my country. Early and short clerkships and a premature rushing into practice, without a competent knowledge in the theory of law, have blasted the hopes of (and ruined the expectations formed by the parents of) most of the students in the profession, who have fallen within my observation for these ten or fifteen years past.

I hold it to be of vast importance that a young man should be able to make some eclat at his opening, which it is in vain to expect from one under twenty-five: missing of this is very apt to discourage and dispirit him, and what is of worse consequence, may prevent the application of clients ever after. It has been observed before I was born, if a man don't obtain a character in any profession soon after his first appearance, he hardly will ever obtain one. The bulk of mankind, I need not inform you, who have conversed with, studied and found many of them out, are a gaping crew, and like little children and all other gazing creatures, won't look long upon one object which gives them pleasure; much less will they seek for entertainment where they have been twice or thrice disappointed. The late eminent Mr. John Reed, who, by some, has been perhaps justly esteemed the greatest common lawyer this continent ever saw, was, you know, many years a clergyman, and had attained the age of forty before he began the practice, if not before

he began the study, of the law. Sir Peter King, formerly Lord High Chancellor of England, kept a grocer's shop till he was turned of thirty, then fell into an acquaintance with the immortal John Locke, who discovered a genius in him, advised him to books and assisted in his education; after which he took to the study of the common law, and finally attained to the highest place to which his royal master could advance a lawyer. I think I have been told the Lord Chief Justice Pemberton, or some one of the Chief Justices of England, was a bankrupt, and in the Fleet prison for debt, before he even dreamed of being a lawyer. I mention these instances, not as arguments to prove it would be most eligible to stay till thirty or forty, before a man begins the study of a profession he is to live by; but this inference I think very fairly follows, that those gentlemen availed themselves much of the ripeness of their judg ments when they began this study, and made much swifter progress than a young man of twenty with all the genius in the world could do; or they would have been approaching superannuation before they would be equipped with a sufficient degree of learning once to give hope for the success they found, and then such hope would vanish, unless they could get a new lease of life and understanding.*

*This extract is taken from a letter addressed by James Otis to his father, in reference to the legal education of his younger brother, Samuel Allyne Otis, who, in later life, became Secretary of the Senate of the United States.