The history of this litigation is interesting, not only as illustrating the defects in provincial justice, but as showing the process by which the conception of constitutional limitations became rooted in the minds of the first generation of lawyers; and in point of fact, they were so thoroughly impregnated with the theory as to incline to carry it to unwarrantable lengths. For example, so justly eminent a counsel as James Otis, in his great argument on the Writs of Assistance in 1761, solemnly maintained the utterly untenable proposition that an act of Parliament “against the Constitution is void: an act against natural equity is void: and if an act of Parliament should be made, in the very words of this petition, it would be void.” [Footnote: Quincy’s _Reports_, p. 474.] While so sound a man, otherwise, as John Adams wrote, in 1776, to Mr. Justice Cushing: “You have my hearty concurrence in telling the jury the nullity of acts of Parliament.... I am determined to die of that opinion, let the _jus gladii_ say what it will.” [Footnote: _Works of J. Adams_, ix. 390.] On looking back at Massachusetts as she was in the year 1700, permeated with the evil theocratic traditions, without judges, teachers, or books, the mind can hardly fail to be impressed with the unconquerable energy which produced great jurists from such a soil; and yet in 1725 Jeremiah Gridley graduated from Harvard, who may fairly be said to have been the progenitor of a famous race; for long before the Revolution, men like Prat, Otis, and John Adams could well have held their own before any court of Common Law that ever sat. Such powerful counsel naturally felt a contempt for the ignorant politicians who for the most part presided over them, which they took little pains to hide. Ruggles one day had an aged female witness who could find no chair and complained to him of exhaustion. He told her to go and sit on the bench. His honor, in some irritation, calling him to account, he replied: “I really thought that place was made for old women.” Hutchinson says of himself: “It was an eyesore to some of the bar to have a person at the head of the law who had not been bred to it.” But he explains with perfect simplicity how his occupation as chief justice “engaged his attention, and he applied his intervals to reading the law.” [Footnote: _Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson_, p. 66.]