of it. Yet America will not submit. New York only differs in the modes." "The act," said Dundas, the solicitor-general of Scotland, "is just, because provoked by the most criminal disobedience; is merciful, because that disobedience would have justified the severest military execution. When it is said no alternative is left to them but to starve or rebel, this is not the fact; for there is another way, to submit." The king, on receiving an account of "the languor of opposition" during the debate, wrote to Lord North: "I am convinced the line adopted in American affairs will be crowned with success."

These words fell from George III. on the day on which Boston commemorated the "massacre" of its citizens, with Joseph Warren for its orator. His subject was the baleful effects of standing armies in time of peace; and it was to be delivered to the town in a town-meeting, contrary to an act of parliament which Gage was sent to Boston to enforce. In the crowd which thronged to the Old South meeting-house appeared about forty British officers of the army and navy; these Samuel Adams, the moderator, received with studied courtesy, placing them all near the orator, some of them on the platform above the pulpit stairs. Conspicuously seated, they listened to a vivid picture of the night of the massacre, after which Warren proceeded:

"Our streets are again filled with armed men, our harbor is crowded with ships-of-war; but these cannot intimidate us; our liberty must be preserved; it is far dearer than life. Should America be brought into vassalage, Britain must lose her freedom; her liberty, as well as ours, will eventually be preserved by the virtue of America. The attempt of parliament to raise a revenue from America and our denial of their right to do it have excited an almost universal inquiry into the rights of British subjects and of mankind. The mutilation of our charter has made every other colony jealous for its own. Even the sending troops to put these acts in execution is not without advantages to us; the exactness and beauty of their discipline inspire our youth with ardor in the pursuit of military knowledge.

"Our country is in danger; our enemies are numerous and powerful; but we have many friends; and, determining

You are

to be free, heaven and earth will aid the resolution. to decide the important question, on which rests the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.

"My fellow-citizens, I know you want not zeal or fortitude. You will maintain your rights or perish in the generous struggle. You will never decline the combat when freedom is the prize. An independence of Great Britain is not our aim, but if pacific measures are ineffectual, and it appears that the only way to safety is through fields of blood, I know you will undauntedly press forward, until tyranny is trodden under foot."

At the motion for "appointing an orator for the ensuing year to commemorate the horrid massacre," the officers of the army and navy who heard the oration began to hiss. The insult exasperated the assembly; but Adams, with imperturbable calmness, restored order, and the vote was taken.

Officers and soldiers of the maddened army longed for revenge. An honest countryman from Billerica, inquiring for a firelock, was offered an old one by a private; but, as soon as he had bought it, he was seized for having violated an act of parliament against trading with soldiers, and confined during the night in the guard-room. The next day he was tarred and feathered, labelled on the back "American liberty, or a specimen of democracy," and carted through the principal streets of the town, accompanied by a guard of twenty men with fixed bayonets; by a mob of officers, among whom was Lieutenant-Colonel Nesbit; and by all the drums and fifes of the forty-seventh, playing Yankee Doodle.

"See what indignities we suffer rather than precipitate a crisis," wrote Samuel Adams to Virginia. The soldiers seemed encouraged to provoke the people, that they might give some color for beginning hostilities.

CHAPTER IX.

THE KING AWAITS NEWS OF SUCCESS.

MARCH-MAY 1775.

DURING this angry strife between the citizens and soldiers at Boston, Lord Howe at London broke off negotiations with Franklin, and the ministry used the pen of Samuel Johnson to inflame the public mind. Johnson was a poor man's son, and had tasted the bitter cup of extreme indigence. From his father he inherited "the vile melancholy that made him mad all his life, at least not sober." For years he had gained a precarious support as an author. He had escaped a prison for a trifle he owed by begging an alms of Richardson, and had known what it is from sheer want to go without a dinner, through all his sufferings preserving a rugged independence. The name of the retired and uncourtly scholar was venerable wherever the English was spoken, by his full display of that language in a dictionary, written amid inconvenience and distraction, in sickness, sorrow, and gloomy solitude, with little assistance of the learned and no patronage of the great. When better days came, he loved and cared for the poor as few else love them. It were to have been wished that a man who complained of his life as "radically wretched," and who was so tenderly sensitive to the wretchedness of others, should have been able to feel for the wrongs of an injured people; but he consented to be employed by the ministry to defend the taxation of America by parliament; and the task was congenial to his hate of the Puritans and his life-long political creed.

The Bostonians had declared to the general congress their willingness to resign their opulent town, and wander into the

country as exiles. "Alas!" retorted Johnson, "the heroes of Boston will only leave good houses to wiser men." To the complaints of their liability to be carried out of their country for trial he answered: "We advise them not to offend." When it was urged that they were condemned unheard, he asserted: "There is no need of a trial; no man desires to hear that which he has already seen." Franklin had remained in Great Britain for no reason but to promote conciliation; with a ponderous effort at mirth, Johnson pointed at him as the "master of mischief." Did the Americans claim a right of resistance, "Audacious defiance!" cried Johnson; "acrimonious malignity! The indignation of the English is like that of the Scythians, who, returning from war, found themselves excluded from their own houses by their slaves." Virginia and the Carolinas had shown impatience of oppression. "How is it," asked Johnson, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes? The slaves should be set free; they may be more grateful and honest than their masters." Lord North inclined to mercy: "Nothing," said the moralist, "can be more noxious to society than clemency which exacts no forfeiture;" and he proposed to arm the savage Indians, turn out the British soldiers on free quarters among the Americans, remodel all their charters, and take away their political privileges. Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, had insisted that the Americans complained only of innovations. "We do not put a calf into the plough," wrote Johnson; "we wait till he is an ox." This, however, the ministry bade him erase, not for its ribaldry, but from unwillingness to concede that the calf had been spared; and Johnson obeyed, comparing himself to a mechanic for whom " the employer is to decide." He mocked at the rule of progression, which showed that America must one day exceed Europe in population. "Then," said he in derision, "in a century and a quarter let the princes of the earth tremble in their palaces."

The pure-minded man, who in a sensual age was the quickener of religious fervor, the preacher to the poor, John Wesley, came forward to defend the system of the court with the usual arguments. He looked so steadily toward the world beyond the skies that he could not brook the interruption of devout

gratitude by bloody contests in this stage of being. The rupture between the English and the Americans was growing wider every day, and to him the total defection of America was the evident prelude of a conspiracy against monarchy, of which the bare thought made him shudder. "No governments under heaven," said he, "are so despotic as the republican; no subjects are governed in so arbitrary a manner as those of a commonwealth. The people never but once in all history gave the sovereign power, and that was to Masaniello of Naples. Our sins will never be removed till we fear God and honor the king." Wesley's mental constitution was not robust enough to gaze on the future with unblenched ealm. He could not foresee that the constellation of republics, so soon to rise in the wilds of America, would welcome the members of the society which he was to found as the pioneers of religion; that the breath of liberty would waft their messages to the masses of the people; would encourage them to collect the white and the negro, slave and master, in the greenwood, for counsel on divine love and the full assurance of grace; and would carry their consolation and songs and prayers to the farthest cabins in the wilderness. To the gladdest of glad tidings for the political regeneration of the world Wesley listened with trembling, as to the fearful bursting of the floodgates of revolution.

In the house of lords, Camden, on the sixteenth of March, took the occasion of the motion to commit the bill depriving New England of the fisheries to reply not to ministers only, but to their pensioned apologist, in a speech which was admired in England and gained applause of Vergennes. He justified the union of the Americans, and refuted the suggestion that New York could be detached from it. By the extent of America, the numbers of its people, their solid, firm, and indissoluble agreement on the great basis of liberty and justice, and the want of men and money on the part of England, he proved that England must fail in her attempt at coercion, that the ultimate independence of America was inevitable. "Suppose the colonies do abound in men," replied Sandwich; "they are raw, undisciplined, and cowardly. I wish, instead of forty or fifty thousand of these brave fellows, they would produce in the field at least two hundred thousand; the more the better; the