accustomed rights of self-government under their revered and ancient charter. Governor Hutchinson himself, though he deemed the commands of Parliament law, and thought it his own bounden duty as an officer of the crown to execute them, declared in the frankest fashion to the ministers themselves that their policy was unjust and mistaken. But, while men’s sentiments concurred in a sense of wrong, their judgments parted company at the choice of what should be done. Men of a conservative and sober way of thinking; men of large fortune or business, who knew what they had at stake should disorders arise or law be set aside; men who believed that there were pacific ways of bringing the government to another temper and method in dealing with the colonies, and who passionately preferred the ways of peace to ways of violence and threatened revolution, arrayed themselves instinctively and at once against every plan that meant lawlessness and rebellion. They mustered very strong indeed, both in numbers and in influence. They bore, many of them, the oldest and most honored names of the colony in Massachusetts, where the storm first broke, and were men of substance and training and schooled integrity of life, besides. Their counsels of prudence were ignored, nevertheless,—as was inevitable. Opinion formed itself with quick and heated impulse in the brief space of those first critical months of irritation and excitement; and these men, though the natural leaders of the colony, were despised, rejected, proscribed, as men craven and lacking the essential spirit either of liberty or of patriotism.