But that was not the end of the matter. The Stamp Act had suddenly brought to light and consciousness principles and passions not likely to be again submerged, and which it was worth the while of statesmen over sea to look into very carefully. Some there were in England who understood them well enough. Mr. John Adams used to say, long afterwards, that the trouble seemed to him to have begun, not in 1765, but in 1761. It was in that year that all the colonies, north and south, had heard of what James Otis had said in the chief court of the province at Boston against the general warrants, the sweeping writs of assistance, for which the customs officers of the crown had asked, to enable them to search as they pleased for goods brought in from foreign parts in defiance of the acts of trade. The writs were not new, and Mr. Otis’s protest had not put a stop to their issue. It had proved of no avail to say, as he did, that they were an intolerable invasion of individual right, flat violations of principles of law which had become a part of the very constitution of the realm, and that even an act of Parliament could not legalize them. But all the colonies had noted that hot contest in the court at Boston, because Mr. Otis had spoken with a singular eloquence which quickened men’s pulses and irresistibly swung their minds into the current of his own thought, and because it had made them more sharply aware than before of what the ministers at home were doing to fix upon the colonies the direct power of the government over sea. These writs of assistance gave the officers who held them authority to search any place they pleased for smuggled goods, whether private residence or public store-house, with or without reasonable ground of suspicion, and meant that the government had at last seriously determined, at whatever cost, to break up the trade with the West Indies and the Spanish Main. Presently armed cutters were put on the coasts the more effectually to stop it. A vice-admiralty court was set up to condemn the cargoes seized, without a jury. The duties were to be rigorously collected and the trade broken up, for the sake of the sugar growers of the British West Indies and merchants in London. [Illustration: JAMES OTIS]