James Otis, the pre-revolutionist Part 11

The portrait of James Otis, Jr., published as a frontispiece to this sketch, is from the oil-painting loaned to the Bostonian Society, by Harrison Gray Otis, of Winthrop, Ma.s.sachusetts. The painting from which it is taken, now hanging in the Old State House of Boston, is a reproduction of the original portrait by I.

Blackburn, to whom Mr. Otis sat for his portrait in 1755. The original in possession of Mrs. Rogers, a descendant of James Otis, may be seen at her residence, No. 8 Otis Place, Boston.

But the original is not so well adapted as is the copy to photographic reproduction. The two portraits are identical in feature and character, but the original having a light background offends the camera.

THE SOURCE AND OCCASION OF THE WAR OF THE REVOLUTION.

"The question is, perhaps more curious than profitable, that relates to the source and occasion of the first of that series of events which produced the war of the Revolution. Men have often asked, what was its original cause, and who struck the first blow? This inquiry was well answered by President Jefferson, in a letter to Dr. Waterhouse of Cambridge, written March 3rd, 1818.

"'I suppose it would be difficult to trace our Revolution to its first embryo. We do not know how long it was hatching in the British cabinet, before they ventured to make the first of the experiments which were to develop it in the end, and to produce complete parliamentary supremacy.

"'Those you mention in Ma.s.sachusetts as preceding the Stamp Act might be the first visible symptoms of that design. The proposition of that Act, in 1764, was the first here. Your opposition, therefore, preceded ours, as occasion was sooner given there than here, and the truth, I suppose, is, that the opposition, in every colony, began whenever the encroachment was presented to it.

"'This question of priority is as the inquiry would be, who first of the three hundred Spartans offered his name to Leonidas. I shall be happy to see justice done to the merits of all.'"

"In the primitive opposition made by Otis to the arbitrary acts of Trade, aided by the Writs of a.s.sistance, he announced two maxims which lay at the foundation of all the subsequent war; one was, that 'taxation without representation was tyranny,' the other, 'that expenditures of public money without appropriations by the representatives of the people, were arbitrary, and therefore unconst.i.tutional. '"

"This early and acute sagacity of our statesman, led Burke finely to describe the political feeling in America as follows;

"'In other countries, the people, more simple, of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government, only by an actual grievance; here they antic.i.p.ate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance, by the badness of the principle.

"'They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.'"--E. L. Magoon.

STAMPS AND THE STAMP ACT.

During Robert Walpole's administration [1732], a stamp duty was proposed. He said "I will leave the taxation of America to some of my successors, who have more courage than I have."

Sir William Keith, governor of Pennsylvania, proposed a tax in 1739. Franklin thought it just, when a delegate in the Colonial Congress at Albany, in 1754. But when it was proposed to Pitt in 1759 the great English statesman said: "I will never burn my fingers with the American stamp act."

THE STAMPS.

The stamps were upon blue paper, and were to be attached to every piece of paper or parchment, on which a legal instrument was written. For these stamps the Government charged specific prices, for example, for a common property deed, one shilling and sixpence.

THE MINUTE-MAN OF THE REVOLUTION.

The Minute-man of the Revolution! He was the old, the middle-aged, and the young. He was Capt. Miles, of Concord, who said that he went to battle as he went to church. He was Capt.

Davis, of Acton, who reproved his men for jesting on the march.

He was Deacon Josiah Haynes, of Sudbury, 80 years old, who marched with his company to the South Bridge at Concord, then joined in the hot pursuit to Lexington, and fell as gloriously as Warren at Bunker Hill. He was James Hayward, of Acton, 22 years old, foremost in that deadly race from Concord to Charlestown, who raised his piece at the same moment with a British soldier, each exclaiming, "You are a dead man!" The Briton dropped, shot through the heart.

James Hayward fell mortally wounded. "Father," he said, "I started with forty b.a.l.l.s; I have three left. I never did such a day's work before. Tell mother not to mourn too much, and tell her whom I love more than my mother, that I am not sorry I turned out."--George W. Curtis.

THE BOSTON COMMON SCHOOLS.

The Boston Common Schools were the pride of the town. They were most jealously guarded, and were opened each day with public prayer.

They were the nurseries of a true democracy. In them the men who played the most important part in the Revolutionary period received their early education.

The Adamses, Chancey, Cooper, Cushing, Hanc.o.c.k, Mayhew, Warren, and the rest breathed their bracing atmosphere.

ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

I have already dwelt on the significance of the way in which the Pilgrim Fathers, driven out of England, begin this compact, with which they begin their life in this new world, with warm professions of allegiance to England's King.

Old England, whose King and bishops drove them out, is proud of them to-day, and counts them as truly her children as Shakespeare and Milton and Vane.

As the American walks the corridors and halls of the Parliament House at Westminster, he pays no great heed to the painted kings upon the painted windows, and cares little for the gilded throne in the gilded House of Lords. The Speaker's chair in the Commons does not stir him most, nor the white form of Hampden that stands silent at the door; but his heart beats fastest where, among great scenes from English triumphs of the days of Puritanism and the revolution, he sees the departure of the Pilgim Fathers to found New England.

England will not let that scene go as a part of American history only, but claims it now as one of the proudest scenes in her own history, too.

It is a bud of promise, I said, when I first saw it there. Shall not its full unfolding be some great reunion of the English race, a prelude to the federation of the world?

Let that picture there in the Parliament House at Westminster stay always in your mind, to remind you of the England in you.

Let the picture of the signing of the compact on the "Mayflower"

stay with it, to remind you of progress and greater freedom.

That, I take it, is what America--New England, now tempered by New Germany, New Ireland, New France--that, I take it, is what America stands for.--Edwin D. Mead.

THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION.

You may perhaps remember how Wendell Phillips, in his great Harvard address on "The Scholar and the Republic" reproached some men of learning for their conservatism and timidity, their backwardness in reform. And it is true that conservatism and timidity are never so hateful and harmful as in the scholar. "Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold," those words which Emerson liked to quote, are words which should ever ring in the scholar's ear.

But you must remember that Roger Williams and Sir Harry Vane, the very men whom Wendell Phillips named as "two men deepest in thought and bravest in speech of all who spoke English in their day," came, the one from Cambridge, the other from Oxford; and that Sam Adams and Jefferson, the two men whom he named as preeminent, in the early days of the republic, for their trust in the people, were the sons of Harvard and William and Mary. John Adams and John Hanc.o.c.k and James Otis and Joseph Warren, the great Boston leaders in the Revolution, were all Harvard men, like Samuel Adams; and you will remember how many of the great Virginians were, like Jefferson, sons of William and Mary.

And never was a revolution so completely led by scholars as the great Puritan Revolution which planted New England and established the English commonwealth.

No. Scholars have often enough been cowards and trimmers.

But from the days when Moses, learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, brought his people up out of bondage, and Paul, who had sat at the feet of Gamaliel, preached Christ, and Wyclif and Luther preached Reformation, to the time when Eliot and Hampden and Pym and Cromwell and Milton and Vane, all scholars of Oxford and Cambridge, worked for English commonwealth, to the time of Jefferson and Samuel Adams and the time of Emerson and Sumner and Gladstone, scholars have been leaders and heroes too.--Edwin D.

Mead.

EARL PERCY AND YANKEE DOODLE.

Earl Percy was the son of the Duke of Northumberland. When he was marching out of Boston, his band struck up the tune of Yankee Doodle, in derision.

He saw a boy in Roxbury making himself very merry as he pa.s.sed.

Percy inquired why he was so merry.

"To think," said the lad, "how you will dance by and by to Chevy Chase."

Percy was much influenced by presentiments, and the words of the boy made him moody. Percy was a lineal descendant of the Earl Percy who was slain in the battle of Chevy Chase, and he felt all day as if some great calamity might befall him.

STORY OF JAMES OTIS. FOR A SCHOOL OR CLUB PROGRAMME.