assemblies; by the clergy on the days of thanksgiving, on fast-days, and quarterly fast-days; and by the agents of the colonies in England; and at last, and more and more, through the press. I say nothing here of the effect of such a controversy so long continued, in sharpening the faculties of the colonies, in making them acute, prompt, ingenious, full of resource, familiar with the grounds of their liberties, their history, revolutions, extent, nature, and the best methods of defending them argumentatively. These were importatnt effects; but I rather choose to ask you to consider how the love of liberty would be inflamed; how ardent, jealous, irresistible it would be made; with what new and what exaggerated value even, it would learn to invest its object, by being thus obliged to struggle so unceasingly to preserve it; and by coming so many times so near to lose it; and by being thus obliged to bear it away like another Palladium, at the hazard of blindness, from the flames of its temple which would have consumed it,—across seas gaping wide to swallow it up,—through serried ranks of armed men who had marked it for a prey. There was one time during this long contest when it might have seemed to any race of men less resolved than our fathers, that liberty had at last returned from earth to the heavens from which she descended. A few years before 1688—the year of the glorious revolution in England—the British king succeeded, after a struggle of more than half a century, in wresting from Massachusetts her first charter. From that time, or rather from December, 1685, to April, 1689, the government of all New England was an undisguised and intolerable despotism. A governor, Sir Edmund Andros,—not chosen by the people as every former governor had been, but appointed by James II.,—worthy to serve such a master,—and a few members, less than the majority, of the council, also appointed by the king, and very fit to advise such a governor, grasped and held the whole civil power. And they exercised it in the very spirit of the worst of the Stuarts. The old, known body of colonial laws and customs which had been adopted by the people, was silently and totally abolished. New laws were made; taxes assessed; an administration all new and all vexatious was introduced, not by the people in general court, but by the governor and 10
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