Mr. Hutchinson left General Gage governor in his stead,—at once governor and military commander. Gage was to face a season of infinite trouble, and, as men soon learned, did not know how to face it either with patience or with tact and judgment. The news of Boston’s punishment and of the suspension of the Massachusetts charter, of the arrangements for troops, and of the legal establishment of methods of trial against which all had protested,—and, in the case of the _Gaspee_ affair, successfully protested,—had an instant and most disturbing effect upon the other colonies, as well as upon those who were most directly affected. The ministers could not isolate Massachusetts. They were dealing with men more statesmanlike than themselves, who did not need to see their own liberties directly struck at to recognize danger, though it was not yet their danger. They had protested in the time of the Stamp Act, which affected them all; this time they protested even more emphatically against measures aimed at Massachusetts alone. What was more significant, they had now means at hand for taking action in common. Virginia, no doubt, seemed to the ministers in England far enough away from Massachusetts, but her Burgesses acted upon the first news of what Parliament was doing,—a month before the text of the obnoxious acts had reached Boston. In May, 1774, they ordered that June 1st, the day the Boston Port bill was to go into effect, be set apart as a day of fasting and prayer,—prayer that civil war might be averted and that the people of America might be united in a common cause. Dunmore promptly dissolved them for their pains; but they quietly assembled again in the long room of the Raleigh Tavern; issued a call thence to the other colonies for a general Congress; and directed that a convention, freely chosen by the voters of the colony as they themselves had been, should assemble there, in that same room of the Raleigh, on the first day of August following, to take final measures with regard to Virginia’s part in the common action hoped for in the autumn. The next evening they gave a ball in honor of Lady Dunmore and her daughters, in all good temper, as they had previously arranged to do,—as if nothing had happened, and as if to show how little what they had done was with them a matter of personal feeling or private intrigue, how much a matter of dispassionate duty. They had not acted singularly or alone. Rhode Island, New York, and Massachusetts herself had also asked for a general “Congress of Committees.” The Massachusetts assembly had locked its doors against the governor’s messenger, sent to dissolve it, until it had completed its choice of a committee “to meet the committees appointed by the several colonies to consult together upon the present state of the colonies.” It was chiefly because Massachusetts called that the other colonies responded, but the movement seemed general, almost spontaneous. Virginia and Massachusetts