compelled to enter into bonds of from £500 to £1000 each to keep the peace, and Mr. Wise was suspended from the ministerial function, and the others disqualified to bear office. The whole expense of time and money to which they were subjected was estimated to exceed £400,—a sum, equivalent to perhaps $5000 of our money,—enough to build the Ipswich part of Warner’s Bridge more than three times over; which the town shortly after nobly and justly, yet gratuitously, refunded to the sufferers. These men, says Pitkin, who is not remarkable for enthusiasm, may justly claim a distinguished rank among the patriots of America. You, their townsmen—their children—may well be proud of them; prouder still, but more grateful than proud, that a full town-meeting of the freemen of Ipswich adopted unanimously that declaration of right, and refused to collect or pay the tax which would have made them slaves. The principle of that vote was precisely the same on which Hampden resisted an imposition of Charles I., and on which Samuel Adams and Hancock and Warren resisted the Stamp Act,—the principle that if any power but the people can tax the people, there is an end of liberty. The later and more showy spectacles and brighter glories and visible results of the age of the Revolution, have elsewhere cast into the shade and almost covered with oblivion the actors on that interesting day, and the act itself,—its hazards, its intrepidity, its merits, its singularity and consequences. But you will remember them, and teach them to your children. The graves of those plain, venerable, and sturdy men of the old, old time, who thus set their lives on the hazard of a die for the perishing liberties of Massachusetts; the site of the house where they assembled—they, the fathers of the town—the day before the meeting, to consider what advice they should give to their children in that great crisis, so full of responsibility and danger; the spot on which that building stood where the meeting was holden and the declaration recorded,—these are among you yet; your honor, your treasure, the memorials and incentives of virtue and patriotism and courage, which feared God and knew no other fear! Go sometimes to those graves, and give an hour of the summer evening to the brave and pious dead. Go there, and 13
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