And thus it was that a generation later the patriotic Otis, of Boston, the man “who dared to love his country and be poor,” spoke so boldly in reply to Hutchinson, who summed up his aristocratic preferences in the odious Horatian maxim, _Odi profanum vulgus_, and who avowed his dissatisfaction that “liberty and property should be enjoyed by the vulgar.”
“God made all men naturally equal,” said Otis. “The ideas of earthly grandeur are acquired, not innate. No government has a right to make a slave of the subject.” And again, “to bring the powers of all into the hands of one or some few, and to make them hereditary, is the interested work of the weak and wicked.”
Such was the philosophy that was daily preached among the burghers of Boston. Such was the doctrine that Patrick Henry came from the Virginia backwoods to voice with his burning eloquence. Such was the spirit that was everywhere animating the colonies, while Parliament enacted one unjust and oppressive law after another. “The sun of American liberty has set,” Ben Franklin wrote from Europe to a friend in America, when he heard of the enactment of the ill-fated Stamp Act; “now we must light the torches of industry and economy.” “Be assured that we shall light torches of another sort,” replied his friend.
The torches were lit; they blazed forth in the shots fired at Lexington, and on Bunker Hill, and in the Declaration of Independence, at Philadelphia; and they were not put out until Parliamentary oppression had been forever ended, and a new nation--a plebeian democracy--took its place by the side of the proudest of earth’s empires.
The war was fought and won by the “Common People,” in the face of the armed force of the foreigner, and the treachery, active or passive, of not a few colonists, whose aristocratic connections or pretensions held them aloof from the movement for liberty. Even in the darkest days of the struggle, when Washington, driven from New York, was retreating before Howe’s advance, and many men of prominence were giving up the patriotic cause as hopeless--Joseph Galloway and Andrew Allen, of Pennsylvania, Samuel Tucker, of New Jersey, John Dickinson, of Delaware, and others--even then the Commander’s wonderful faith and courage was reflected in the fidelity of the populace. That alone made possible the final triumph.