I shall next give you a Sketch of some of Mr. Samuel Adams’ Features; & I do not know how to delineate them stronger, than by the Observation made by a celebrated Painter in America, vizt. “That if he wished to draw the Picture of the Devil, that he would get Sam Adams to sit for him:” & indeed, a very ordinary Physiognomist would, at a transient View of his Countenance, develope the Malignity of his Heart. He was a Person of Understanding, but it was discoverable rather by a Shrewdness than Solidity of Judgment; & he understood human Nature, in low life, so well, that he could turn the Minds of the great Vulgar as well as the small into any Course that he might chuse; perhaps he was a singular Instance in this Kind; & he never failed of employing his Abilities to the vilest Purposes.

Antiracism gained power in the United States through what we call the civil-rights movement. Perhaps a more precise name would be the black-rage industry, but we can compromise and settle for blackpower movement. When you hear these words, you probably think of the “carnivorous” side of the whole circus, with Huey Newton, H. Rap Brown and Field Marshal Cinque, and not the “vegetarian” side, with Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, etc.

But from the perspective of European-Americans, the two acted as a perfect Mutt and Jeff act. Mutt said: I’ll kill you. Jeff said: That Mutt is a really bad apple, and if you don’t give me money and power he might well kill you.

To a Loyalist, this all sounds dreadfully familiar. Remember the pattern of the American Rebellion: the likes of Otis and Sam Adams raised hell, and the likes of Burke and Pitt explained that they were raising hell because they weren’t given enough money and power. Of course, the conciliations of the latter did precisely nothing to reconcile the former to British government.

What is ""Freedom"" Anyways?

Congress has all along been but a clumsy recording machine of conclusions worked out in the laboratory and machine-shop; and yet the idea is still deeply seated in the minds of men otherwise intelligent that, to effect political results, it is necessary to hold office, or at least to be a politician and to be heard from the hustings. Is not the exact reverse more truly the case? The situation may not be, indeed it certainly is not, as it should be; it may be, I hold that it is, unfortunate that the scholar and investigator are finding themselves more and more excluded from public life by the professional with an aptitude for the machine, but the result is none the less patent. On all the issues of real moment,—issues affecting anything more than a division of the spoils or the concession of some privilege of exaction from the community, it is the student, the man of affairs and the scientist who to-day, in last resort, closes debate and shapes public policy. His is the last word.