“‘Let the consequences be what they will, I am determined to proceed. The only principles of public conduct that are worthy of a gentleman or a man are to sacrifice estate, ease, health, and applause, and even life, to the sacred calls of country. These principles, in private life, make the good citizen,--in public life, the patriot and the hero.’ “Then, rising with the progress of his great theme, he continues:-- “‘Every man in a state of Nature is an independent sovereign, subject to no law but the law written upon his heart and revealed to him by his Maker. His right to his life, his liberty, and his property no created being can rightfully contest; these rights are inherent and inalienable.’ “We watch the effect of his indignant words. They convince and awe, and yet the royal tribunal dare not decide. It prevaricates and postpones; but the victory is won, the odious measure is abandoned forever, and the orator’s utterances have lighted up a flame which Independence alone can ever quench. “We go with him from this first theatre of triumph, through many long years of toil and anxiety in shaping the measures which led to the great conflict with the mother country, to the General Court guided by his skill and political sagacity, to the popular assembly alike aroused to turbulence and hushed to repose by his burning eloquence. We see him hurling defiance at the minions of power who with secret malevolence assailed his reputation. We witness their malignant hatred, and their deadly assault upon his person, when alone and unarmed. We see him fall, covered with wounds, and carried bleeding to his home. “Thenceforward, to the actual opening of the Revolutionary drama, and during its progress, this act of regal barbarism obscured, but did not wholly extinguish, the light of the great intellect which it sought to destroy; but all that remained was a wreck, reminding only of the glories of the past. The crime against the person added to its atrocity a greater crime against the soul, dooming it to pursue its earthly career in sadness and gloom. Conscious of being only a monument of decay, well might the gradually expiring patriot wish, that, when God, in his righteous Providence, should call him from time into eternity, it might be by a flash of lightning. We may rejoice that his prayer was answered, and that, too noble to be permitted to die a common death, in a manner equally affecting and sublime, JAMES OTIS [_applause_] was removed to the mansions of eternal felicity.