Concerning the civil life of such a man, much might with ease be written. The head and front of every great political movement of his country, from his thirtieth year to the day of his death he lived no obscure life, and was missed from no contest. "The great pillar of support to the Declaration of Independence," as Jefferson called him, its fearless and eloquent defender, the right hand of his country's diplomacy, and the strength of her treaties, he is a portion of her history and his acts are her annals. But this devotion to the great political struggles of his time was not consistent with home delights. These he was to scorn and to live laborious days. Early immersed in the stirring events of his day, he surrendered to the duty of serving, all private claims; he gave up his profession, he separated himself from his wife and children to go wherever he could be useful; he abandoned a mode of life most dear to him; and leaving his little Sabine farm and his friendly books, with no hopes of personal aggrandizement, and small, unjoyous prospect of success in the venture he was aiding, went out to fight. His first act of importance, a worthy beginning to such career, was his defence of Preston, in the famous trial for the murder of certain citizens of Boston by British soldiers, in 1770. Preston was the captain of the British troops stationed in Boston, and under government orders. As may easily be imagined, in the uneasy state of public feeling, exasperated by real injuries and petty tyrannies, suspicious, discontented and spurred on by men who circulated a thousand injurious reports, the people and the foreign soldiery were ready at any moment to break out into open quarrel. Finally, this did indeed happen. The soldiery, provoked beyond endurance, resisted the assaults of the people, and fired upon them. Captain Preston was arrested and imprisoned; five citizens had been killed and many wounded, and it was with difficulty that the people were restrained from rising into furious rebellion. Preston was taken to prison to await his trial, but it was for a time impossible to obtain counsel, so great was the hatred of the people to the soldiery, and so strong the feeling that no man would be safe from violence who would attempt to defend these foreigners for the murder of his own fellow-citizens. John Adams--then a rising lawyer in Boston, and a man who had already given hints of coming greatness--was sent for by the unfortunate captain, who begged him to undertake his cause. "I had no hesitation in answering," says Adams in his autobiography, "that counsel ought to be the very last thing that an accused person should want in a free country; that the bar ought, in my opinion, to be independent and impartial at all times, and in every circumstance, and that persons whose lives were at stake ought to have the counsel they preferred. But he must be sensible this would be as important a cause as was ever tried in any court or country in the