this thought of free association and quick and organized coöperation in the air, which no one was surprised at any time to see acted upon and made an instrument of agitation. [Illustration: NORTH AMERICA 1750, SHOWING CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF EXPLORATION. BORMAY & CO., N. Y.] [Illustration: GEORGE III] What made the Massachusetts committees of correspondence especially significant and especially telling in their effect upon affairs was that they were not used, like the “Westmoreland Association” or the non-importation associations of 1769, merely as a means of keeping neighbors steadfast in the observance of a simple resolution of passive resistance, but were employed to develop opinion and originate action from month to month,—dilatory, defensive, or aggressive, as occasion or a change of circumstances might demand. The non-importation associations had been powerful enough, as some men had reason to know. The determination not to import or use any of the things upon which Parliament had laid a tax to be taken of the colonies,—wine, oil, glass, paper, tea, or any of the rest of the list,—was not a thing all men had thought of or spontaneously agreed to. Certain leading gentlemen, like Mr. Mason and Colonel Washington, deemed it a serviceable means of constitutional resistance to the mistaken course of the ministry, induced influential members of the House of Burgesses to indorse it, and formed associations to put it into effect,—to see to it that no one drank wine or tea which had been brought in under Mr. Townshend’s taxes. There was here no command of law,—only a moral compulsion, the “pressure of opinion”; but it was no light matter to be censured and talked about by the leading people in your county as a person who defied the better sort of opinion and preferred wine and tea to the liberties of the colony. Associated opinion, spoken by influential men, proved a tremendous engine of quiet duress, and the unwilling found it prudent to conform. It was harder yet for the timid where active committees of correspondence looked into and suggested opinion. Men could give up their wine, or women their tea, and still keep what opinions they pleased; but committees of correspondence sought out opinion, provoked discussion, forced men to take sides or seem indifferent; more than all, saw to it that Mr. Samuel Adams’s opinions were duly promulgated and established by argument. [Illustration: GEORGE MASON]