John Adams, "Novanglus Papers", no. 7. Reported in Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams (1851), vol. 4, p. 106. Adams published articles in 1774 in the Boston, Massachusetts, Gazette using the pseudonym "Novanglus". In this paper he credited James Harrington with expressing the idea this way. Harrington described government as "the empire of laws and not of men" in his 1656 work, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1771), p. 35. The phrase gained wider currency when Adams used it in the Mhttps://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Law