casion, permit me here to enter upon the
examination of this anti-revolutionary theory, which arrays State
sovereignty against the constituent sovereignty of the people, and
distorts the Constitution of the United States into a league of
friendship between confederate corporations, I speak to matters of
fact. There is the Declaration of Independence, and there is the
Constitution of the United States--let them speak for themselves.
The grossly immoral and dishonest doctrine of despotic State
sovereignty, the exclusive judge of its own obligations, and
responsible to no power on earth or in heaven, for the violation of
them, is not there. The Declaration says, it is not in me. The
Constitution says, it is not in me.

SAMUEL ADAMS (1723-1803)

Samuel Adams, called by his contemporaries, "the Father of the
American Revolution," drew up in 1764 the instructions of the people
of Boston to their representatives in the Massachusetts general
assembly, containing what is said to be the first official denial of
the right of the British Parliament to tax the Colonists.

Deeply religious by nature, having what Everett calls "a most
angelic voice," studying sacred music as an avocation, and
exhibiting through life the fineness of nerve and sensitiveness of
temperament which gave him his early disposition to escape the
storms of life by a career in the pulpit, circumstances, or rather
his sense of fitness, dominating his physical weakness, imposed on
him the work of leading in what results have shown to be the
greatest revolution of history. So sensitive, physically, that he
had "a tremulous motion of the head when speaking," his intellectual
force was such that he easily became a leader of popular opposition
to royal authority in New England. Unlike Jefferson in being a
fluent public speaker, he resembled him in being the intellectual
heir of Sidney and Locke. He showed very early in life the bent
which afterwards forced him, as it did the naturally timid and
retiring Jefferson, to take the leadership of the uneducated masses
of the people against the wealth, the culture, and the conservatism
of the colonial aristocracy.

After passing through the Lovell School he graduated at Harvard
College, and on proposing a thesis for his second degree, as college
custom required, he defended the proposition that "it is lawful to
resist the supreme authority, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise
be preserved." Like questions h