Daily Inspiration Quote by James Otis

Obedience is the mask here, not the message. Otis opens by performing deference to authority ("in obedience to your order"), then immediately widens the frame until that authority looks cramped and conditional. He is not just showing up because he was summoned; he is showing up with a constituency at his back ("the inhabitants of this town") and with a principle larger than any court directive ("the liberties of the subject"). The sentence is a legal bow that doubles as a political shove.

The context is colonial Massachusetts, where petitions and courtroom arguments were among the few sanctioned tools for resisting imperial policy without being crushed as outright rebels. Otis, a lawyer steeped in British constitutional language, strategically insists on loyalty to procedure while smuggling in a radical claim: power must justify itself to the governed. By foregrounding the townspeople's petition, he makes the dispute public, not merely technical. He turns a case into a referendum on who counts in governance.

The subtext is a warning delivered in the most respectable register available. Otis signals that colonial compliance is not passive submission; it is contingent on rights inherited and enforceable. "Liberties of the subject" is doing heavy lifting: it evokes the English tradition of limits on state power, implying that the Crown's agents are the ones flirting with illegitimacy. In a single, carefully balanced clause, Otis recasts resistance as duty and casts authority as something that must answer to law, not command it.