It was he who had stood at the front of the opposition of the Massachusetts assembly to the Stamp Act; he who had drafted the circular letter of Massachusetts to the other colonies in 1768 suggesting concert of action against the Townshend acts; he who had gone from the town meeting in Faneuil Hall to demand of Hutchinson the immediate removal of the troops, after the unhappy “massacre” of March, 1770; he who had led the town meeting which took effectual measures to prevent the landing of the tea from the East India Company’s ships. No man doubted that his hand had been in the plan to throw the tea into the harbor. It was he who, last of all, as the troubles thickened, had bound the other towns of Massachusetts to Boston in a common organization for making and propagating opinion by means of committees of correspondence. It was late in 1772 when he proposed to the town meeting in Boston that the other towns of the colony be invited to co-operate with it in establishing committees of correspondence, by means of which they could exchange views, and, if need were, concert action. The end of November had come before he could make Boston’s initiative complete in the matter; and yet the few scant weeks that remained of the year were not gone before more than eighty towns had responded. [Illustration: CIRCULAR OF THE BOSTON COMMITTEE OF CORRESPONDENCE] It turned out that he had invented a tremendously powerful engine of propaganda for such opinions and suggestions of action as he chose to put upon the wind or set afloat in his private correspondence,—as he had, no doubt, foreseen, with his keen appreciation of the most effectual means of agitation. Here was, in effect, a league of towns to watch and to control the course of affairs. There was nothing absolutely novel in the plan, except its formal completeness and its appearance of permanence, as if of a standing political arrangement made out of hand. In the year 1765, which was now seven years gone by, Richard Henry Lee had taken an active part among his neighbors in Virginia in forming the “Westmoreland Association,” which drew many of the leading spirits of the great county of Westmoreland together in concerted resistance to the Stamp Act. Four years later (1769) the Burgesses of Virginia, cut short in their regular session as a legislature by a sudden dissolution proclaimed by their royal governor, met in Mr. Anthony Hay’s house in Williamsburg and adopted the resolutions for a general non-importation association which George Mason had drawn up, and which George Washington, Mr. Mason’s neighbor and confidant, read and moved. There followed the immediate organization of local associations throughout the little commonwealth to see to the keeping of the pledge there taken. Virginia had no town meetings; each colony took its measures of non-importation and resistance to parliamentary taxation after its own fashion; but wherever there were Englishmen accustomed to political action there was always