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Thus descended, thus reared, thus associated, every factor of his environment should have molded the youthful mind of CHARLES CARROLL of Carrollton in the rut of the past and ordained him as a defender of the tyranny of kings against the rights of the people.

Notwithstanding a previous effort of his father to have him sell his estates in Maryland and expatriate himself, he returned to America in 1765 a finished scholar and an accomplished gentleman and took possession of his large estates in Maryland, part of which was called “Carrollton," by which he afterwards distinguished himself from his relative, Charles Carroll, barrister, of Annapolis. With wealth to indulge every whim, with refined literary taste and ability to engage his thought, with friends to amuse him, and barred from public life and politics by his religion, there was nothing to draw him into the vortex of the controversy over human rights by which he soon found himself surrounded save the inherent sense of justice and of right which shaped his whole life. The profits of his profession offered no temptation; the emoluments of office could not allure the richest man in the province. He could hope to gain no concessions from the Provincial Government in espousing its cause; no place of prominence and power at the hands of the people for defending their rights, for both were Protestant. He was a Catholic, disqualified by reason of his faith from voting or holding office in the "Land of the Sanctuary."

The loss of his fixed and substantial wealth stood as a constant warning to him not to be active in any of the many controversies arising in this new country and age, and pointed to indifference and neutrality as the course which an enlightened selfishness should pursue.

Association, friendship, love of home and neighbor, did not combine to turn him to the cause of his countrymen, for he had spent his whole life from childhood to mature manhood in the schools of absolutism in France, and had formed his friendships

among those classes in both England and France which were not only wedded to the forms and practices of tyranny, but were in many instances a part of the government which oppressed.

No man in all the colonies was more encircled by conditions that would have predisposed him to the royal cause, or at least to diplomatic inactivity, than CHARLES CARROLL of Carrollton.

Reason, experience, and indeed posterity would have condoned such a course, and nothing but an enlightened mind, a loyal and a brave heart, could have so completely divorced him from all the precedents of his life. The ordinary man is largely the creature of circumstances. crowd.

He usually follows the

To accept the conditions in which a man finds himself, to agree with his neighbor, make no great draft on either moral or physical courage. To break the bond of one's surroundings, to sever old friendships and associations, to disagree with one's neighbor, aye, to fight and kill him, to risk life, property, all, in crises which involve all, demands that lofty moral courage, that intelligent self-containment, that complete unselfishness, that has in all ages distinguished the great man from the small.

What did this young Irishman find when in 1764, at 27 years of age, he set foot upon the soil of Maryland and took possession of his large estate? He found a fair land, dedicated to religious freedom, welcoming him as a citizen, but for his faith depriving him of a citizen's dearest rights; a province whose royal charter guaranteed its citizens all the ancient rights of Englishmen and protected them, in terms, from taxation by any but their own representative; a colony sacred to man's most modern rights trembling with the prospect of the stamp act, finally imposed on the 22d day of March, 1765.

He found the proprietary government, the government of which his fathers had been a part, the government of the benefactors of his family, bent upon imposing taxes upon the people in the shape of fees of public officers and tithes to the Episcopal

clergy by proclamation of the governor without the consent of the people through their representatives. The stamp act would have cost him but little, the fees to public officers and tithes to the clergy would not have embarrassed him seriously in nis great wealth. He could have paid them, but in each of these controversies he saw a principle embodied, the sacred principle that the people alone have the right to tax themselves. He saw that this question must be settled then, there, for him, for his fellow-citizens, for humanity, for posterity.

No hesitation marked his course. Throwing aside every association of his early life, risking his vast property, manfully overcoming every predilection arising from his ancestry, birth, and education, he cast his lot with the people. No public act or utterance marks his attitude toward this historic piece of tyranny, for he could not vote or hold office; but that his heart was the patriot's heart appears in a letter to his friend Edmund Jennings, of London, in which he says:

Should the stamp act be enforced by tyrannical soldiery, our property, our liberty, our very existence is at an end. And you may be persuaded that nothing but an armed force can execute this worst of laws. Can England, surrounded with powerful enemies, distracted with intestine factions, encumbered and almost staggering under the immense load of debt, little short of £150,000,000, send out such a powerful army to deprive their fellow-subjects of their rights and liberties?

If ministerial influence and parliamentary corruption should not blush at such a detestable sheme; if Parliament, blind to their own interest and forgetting that they are the guardians of sacred liberty and of our happy constitution, should have the impudence to avow this open infraction of both, will England, her commerce annihilated by the oppression of America, be able to maintain these troops? Reflect on the immense ocean that divides this fruitful country from the island whose power, as its territory is circumscribed, has already arrived at its zenith, while the power of this continent is growing daily and in time will be as unbounded as our dominions are extensive. The rapid increase in manufactures surpasses the expectation of the most sanguine American. Even the arts and sciences commence to flourish, and in these, as in arms, the day, I hope, will come when America will be superior to all the world.

Prophetic hope, uttered at the dawn of the nation's darkest day, resplendently realized at the dawn of a new century, on a day when we commemorate the virtues of the patriot whom it inspired!

In his opposition to the next step of government, to assume the rights of the people CHARLES CARROLL left his retirement and stepped into public gaze as the avowed champion of the people. Public officers in Maryland had always been paid by fees fixed by the assembly. The law fixing those fees and the tithes which the Episcopal clergy of the Established Church were allowed to collect had expired by its own limitation. The house of burgesses and the council failed to agree on a new law, and Governor Eden prorogued the assembly and by executive proclamation fixed the fees and tithes himself.

This action of the governor aroused more indignation in the province, if possible, than the stamp act, which was soon repealed. In his opposition to this proclamation he perhaps shone brightest in all his long advocacy of the people's rights against the aggressions of arbitrary power.

In a series of published letters, replete with erudition, in classic style and poignant satire, CHARLES CARROLL again. espoused the people's cause, and, on the broad ground that these fees and tithes were nothing short of taxes on the people, and as such could only be imposed upon them by their consent, through their duly elected representatives, he arraigned the governor and his secretary of state, the gifted Daniel Dulaney, in dialogues between the First and Second Citizen, and which were the philippics of the age.

During this written debate he was taunted as "Jesuit," "anti-Christ," a "man without a country;" and yet his devotion to the people's cause rose supreme over every insult, over all injustice, and inspired him with an eloquence of diction. and a forcefulness of statement which put to rout the great Daniel Dulaney, the peer of any lawyer of his time in England or America.

The broad liberality of his mind and soul, his devotion to civil and religious freedom, appear in this controversy, when, in referring to the English Revolution, he says:

That the national religion was in danger under James the Second from his bigotry and despotic temper, the dispensing power assumed by him

and every other part of his conduct clearly evince. The nation had a right to resist and so secure its civil and religious liberties. I am as averse to having a religion crammed down people's throats as a proclamation.

This was the reply of a Catholic in a time of intense feeling between religious sects, which had gone to the length of bloody wars, in a controversy in which the deprivation of his rights by reason of his religion furnished the taunt to this adversary, and characterizes a mind as broad and a soul as lofty as the spirit of religious toleration in which Maryland alone of all the colonies first reared an altar.

Meanwhile events hurried on in rapid succession. England, bent upon the subjugation of the colonies, deprived them of one ancient right after another-the duty on tea, the Boston port bill, the appointment of the judiciary by the Crown, the navigation acts, were all laid with ruthless hand upon the weak but determined colonists. The people remonstrated, petitioned, prayed. At last when petition availed not, when remonstrance seemed vain, when patience had ceased to be a virtue, and moderation had failed, the people of the colonies, characterized as well by their loyalty and obedience as by their love of law and hatred of tyranny, rebelled against the systematic oppressions of George the Third.

The immortal Otis inspired Massachusetts by his magnificent patriotism and proposed a congress of the colonies. "Join or die" echoed from the green hills of New Hampshire to the shores of the Savannah. Virginia, under Patrick Henry; South Carolina, under Christopher Gadsden; and Maryland, with a spontaneous outburst of patriotism led by CHARLES CARROLL and Thomas Johnson, approved the suggestion; and each of the colonies, catching up the music of union, joined with heavenly harmony in the glorious anthem of a new nation. In all this struggle the province of Maryland was foremost, most unselfish.

To prove this must we be reminded that the Frederick County court first had the courage, eleven years before the Declaration of Independence, to declare the stamp act unconstitutional; that before a hostile foot had pressed her soil the sons

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