But if we had not, our fathers have earned it and bought it for us, at
the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their
blood. And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among
the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to
knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given
them understandings and a desire to know. But, besides this, they have a
right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible right, to that most
dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the character and
conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and
trustees of the people and if the cause, the interest and trust, is
insidiously betrayed or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right
to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed, and to
constitute other and better agents, attorneys, and trustees."
The citizens of this town conferred on Mr. Adams his first political
distinction, and clothed him with his first political trust, by electing
him one of their representatives in 1770. Before this time he had become
extensively known throughout the province, as well by the part he had
acted in relation to public affairs, as by the exercise of his
professional ability.
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