The all-absorbing sentiment of his life, the wealth of his diction, and the fire of his oratory have been embodied in a form which stands among the best of American classics. In the romance of “The Rebels,” Miss Lydia Maria Francis (afterwards Mrs. Child) introduces James Otis as a leading character. After the opening statement, that “there was hurrying to and fro through the streets of Boston on the night of the 14th of August, 1765,” his patriotic American woman shows such a right conception of the power and oratory of Otis, as well as of the actual tone and spirit of his times, that the fragments of her hero’s conversation during the story, gathered in the form of a speech, have often been mistaken for some actual appeal to the people of his period. The youth of America will do well to keep it fresh in mind, and thereby honor both its author and its subject. SPEECH OF JAMES OTIS IN 1765 England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the steps of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland. Arbitrary principles, like those against which we now contend, have cost one king of England his life, another his crown, and they may yet cost a third his most flourishing colonies. We are two millions, one-fifth fighting-men. We are bold and vigorous, and we call no man master. To the nation from whom we are proud to derive our origin we ever were, and we ever will be, ready to yield unforced assistance; but it must not, and it never can be extorted. Some have sneeringly asked, Are the Americans too poor to pay a few pounds on stamped paper? No! America, thanks to God and herself, is rich. But the right to take ten pounds implies the right to take a thousand; and what must be the wealth that avarice, aided by power, cannot exhaust? True, the specter is now small; but the shadow he casts before him is huge enough to darken all this fair land. Others, in sentimental style, talk of the immense debt of gratitude which we owe to England. And what is the amount of this debt? Why, truly, it is the same that the young lion owes to the dam which has brought it forth on the solitude of the mountain, or left it amid the winds and storms of the desert. We plunged into the wave, with the great charter of freedom in our teeth, because the fagot and torch were behind us. We have waked this new world from its savage lethargy; forests have been prostrated in our path; towns and cities have grown up suddenly as the flowers of the tropics; and the fires in our autumnal woods are scarcely more rapid than the increase of our wealth and population. And do we owe all this to the kind succor of the mother-country? No; we owe it to the tyranny that drove us from her; to the pelting storms which invigorated our helpless infancy!