Men thought for themselves in Massachusetts, and Mr. Adams was too astute a leader to seem to force opinions upon them. He knew a better and more certain way. He drew Mr. Hutchinson, the governor, into controversy, and provoked him to unguarded heat in the expression of his views as to the paramount authority of Parliament and the bounden duty of the colonists to submit if they would not be accounted rebels. He let heat in the governor generate heat in those who loved the liberty of the colony; supplied patriots with arguments, phrases, resolutions of right and privilege; watchfully kept the fire alive; forced those who were strong openly to take sides and declare themselves, and those who were weak to think with their neighbors; infused agitation, disquiet, discontent, dissonance of opinion into the very air; and let everything that was being said or done run at once from town to town through the ever talkative committees of correspondence. He sincerely loved the liberty to which America had been bred; loved affairs, and wanted nothing for himself, except the ears of his neighbors; loved the air of strife and the day of debate, and the busy concert of endless agitation; was statesman and demagogue in one, and had now a cause which even slow and thoughtful men were constrained to deem just. The ministers supplied fuel enough and to spare to keep alive the fires he kindled; and presently the system of committees which he had devised for the towns of a single colony had been put into use to bring the several colonies themselves together. Opinion began to be made and moved and augmented upon a great scale. Spontaneous, no doubt, at first, at heart spontaneous always, it was elaborately, skilfully, persistently assisted, added to, made definite, vocal, universal,—now under the lead of men in one colony, again under the lead of those in another. Massachusetts, with her busy port and her noisy town meetings, drew the centre of the storm to herself; but the other colonies were not different in temper. Virginia, in particular, was as forward as Massachusetts. Virginia had got a new governor out of England early in 1772, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, who let more than a year go by from his first brief meeting with the Burgesses before he summoned them again, because he liked their lack of submission as little as they liked his dark brow and masterful temper; but he suffered them to convene at last, in March, 1773, and they forthwith gave him a taste of their quality, as little to his palate as he could have expected. [Illustration: SEAL OF DUNMORE] [Illustration: EARL OF DUNMORE]