The cause of Human Liberty, in this great controversy, found voice in James Otis, a young lawyer of eloquence, learning, and courage, whose early words, like the notes of the morning bugle mingling with the dawn, awakened the whole country. Asked by the merchants of Boston to speak at the bar against Writs of Assistance, issued to enforce ancient Acts of Parliament, he spoke both as lawyer and as patriot, and so doing became a statesman. His speech was the most important, down to that occasion, ever made on this side of the ocean. An earnest contemporary, who was present, says, “No harangue of Demosthenes or Cicero ever had such effects upon this globe as that speech.”[93] It was the harbinger of a new era. For five hours the brilliant orator unfolded the character of these Acts of Parliament; for five hours he held the court-room in rapt and astonished admiration; but his effort ascended into statesmanship, when, after showing that the colonists were without representation in Parliament, he cried out, that, notwithstanding this exclusion, Parliament had undertaken to “impose taxes, and enormous taxes, burdensome taxes, oppressive, ruinous, intolerable taxes”; and then, glowing with generous indignation at this injustice, he launched that thunderbolt of political truth, “Taxation without representation is Tyranny.”[94] From the narrow court-room where he spoke, the thunderbolt passed, smiting and blasting the intolerable pretension. It was the idea of John Locke; but the fervid orator, with tongue of flame, gave to it the intensity of his own genius. He found it in a book of philosophy; but he sent it forth a winged messenger blazing in the sky.