It was, no doubt, a time when it was necessary that something should be done,—as well as something said. It was intolerable to the spirit of most of the people, when once they were roused, to sit still under a suspension of their charter, a closing of their chief port, the appointment of judges and governors restrained by none of the accustomed rules of public authority among them, and tamely utter written protests only, carrying obedience to what seemed to them the length of sheer servility. It happened that there had gone along with the hateful and extraordinary parliamentary measures of 1774 an act extending the boundaries of the province of Quebec to the Ohio River and establishing an arbitrary form of government within the extended province. It was a measure long ago planned. Its passage at that time had nothing to do with the ministers’ quarrel with the self-governing colonies to the southward. But it was instantly interpreted in America as an attempt to limit the westward expansion of the more unmanageable colonies which, like Massachusetts, arrogated the right to govern themselves; and it of course added its quota of exasperation to the irritations of the moment. It seemed worse than idle to treat ministers who sent such a body of revolutionary statutes over sea as reasonable constitutional rulers who could be brought to a more lawful and moderate course by pamphlets and despatches and public meetings, and all the rest of the slow machinery of ordinary agitation. Of course, too, Samuel Adams and those who acted with him very carefully saw to it that agitation should not lose its zest or decline to the humdrum levels of ordinary excitement. They kept their alarm bells pealing night and day, and were vigilant that feeling should not subside or fall tame. And they worked upon genuine matter. They knew the temper of average men in the colony much better than their conservative opponents did, and touched it with a much truer instinct in their appeals. Their utterances went to the quick with most plain men,—and they spoke to a community of plain men. They spoke to conviction as well as to sentiment, and the minds they touched were thoroughly awakened. Their doctrine of liberty was the ancient tradition of the colony. The principles they urged had been urged again and again by every champion of the chartered liberties of the colonies, and seemed native to the very air. [Illustration: SIGNATURE OF JOSEPH HAWLEY]