The ministers did persist, and there was revolution. Within less than a year from those memorable autumn days of 1773 when the East India Company’s ships came into port with their cargoes of tea, the colonies had set up a Congress at Philadelphia which looked from the first as if it meant to do things for which there was no law; and which did, in fact, within less than two years after its first assembling, cut the bonds of allegiance which bound America to England. The colonists did not themselves speak or think of it as a body set up to govern them, or to determine their relations with the government at home, but only as a body organized for consultation and guidance, a general meeting of their committees of correspondence. But it was significant how rapidly, and upon how consistent and executive a plan, the arrangements for “correspondence” had developed, and how naturally, almost spontaneously, they had come to a head in this “Congress of Committees.” There were men in the colonies who were as quick to act upon their instinct of leadership, and as apt and masterful at organization, as the English on the other side of the water who had checkmated Charles I.; and no doubt the thought of independent action, and even of aggressive resistance, came more readily to the minds of men of initiative in America, where all things were making and to be made, than in old England, where every rule of action seemed antique and venerable. Mr. Samuel Adams had been deliberately planning revolution in Massachusetts ever since 1768, the year the troops came to Boston to hold the town quiet while Mr. Townshend’s acts strangled its trade; and he had gone the straight way to work to bring it about. He knew very well how to cloak his purpose and sedulously keep it hid from all whom it might shock or dismay or alienate. But the means he used were none the less efficacious because those who acted with him could not see how far they led. [Illustration: BOYCOTTING POSTER]