Page:The Journal of American History Volume 9.djvu/459

 about a dozen in all, Mr. Wise held a meeting at Ipswich Village on August 22, 1687, the day before the Town Meeting, and discussed with these and other leading citizens the action to be recommended to the voters when they should assemble the next day. Mr. Wise addressed that Town Meeting in a lengthy and impassioned address and it is deeply to be regretted that no copy of this remarkable speech has been preserved. History informs us that a manuscript copy was afterwards carried to a few other towns and was the means of causing several of them to follow the example of Ipswich. This speech, according to tradition, fairly electrified his audience. Could this manuscript copy, which was read later in other town meetings, be now discovered it might take high rank with the very ablest American documents, not even excepting the Declaration of Independence.

In his "History of American Literature," Professor Moses Coit Taylor says: "Upon the whole, no other author of the Colonial times is the equal of John Wise in the union of great breadth and power of thought, with great splendor of speech, and he stands almost alone among our earlier writers for the blending of a racy and dainty humor with impassioned earnestness."

The town records of the memorable meeting where this magnificent speech was delivered quaintly tell us concerning the action of the town after the hearing thereof, as follows:

"That considering the said act doth infringe their liberty as free born English subjects of his Majesty by interfering with the statutory laws of the land, by which it is enacted that no tax shall be levied on the subjects without consent of an assembly, chosen by the freeholders, for assessing same, they do, therefore, vote that they are not willing to choose a commissioner with such an end without said privileges, and moreover consent not that the select men do proceed to lay out any such rate until it be appointed by a general assembly concurring with the Governor and Council. Voted by the whole assembly twice."

Taxation without the consent of the people was the issue in Ipswich in 1687, just as in 1775 "Taxation without Representation" was the issue on which our War of Independence was fought to a successful end. Macauley tells us that Washington and Franklin were both willing at one time during the Revolutionary War to recommend submission to England, provided this one principle of self-taxation should be conceded by the British Parliament, and this single quotation from Macauley proves that Ipswich stood out the leader in 1687 for the principle upon which was founded our American Independence, and its town seal to this day truly declares Ipswich to be "The Birthplace