It was in June, 1772, while the Virginian burgesses waited for their tardy summons to Williamsburg that his Majesty’s revenue cutter _Gaspee_ was deliberately boarded and burned by the Rhode Islanders. The Burgesses had but just assembled in the autumn when the ominous news came that a royal commission had been sent over to look sharply into the matter, and see to the arrest and deportation of all chiefly concerned. Dabney Carr, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson, young men all, and radicals, members of the House, privately associated themselves for the concert of measures to be taken in the common cause of the colonies. Upon their initiative the Burgesses resolved, when the news from Rhode Island came, to appoint at once a permanent committee of correspondence; instruct it to inquire very particularly into the facts about this royal commission; and ask the other colonies to set up similar committees, for the exchange of information concerning public affairs and the maintenance of a common understanding and concert in action. By the end of the year Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and South Carolina had adopted the suggestion and set their committees to work. [Illustration: THE ATTACK ON THE “GASPEE”] Massachusetts, of course. This was Mr. Samuel Adams’s new machinery of agitation upon a larger scale. Adams himself had long cherished the wish that there might be such a connection established between the colonies. In the autumn of 1770 he had induced the Massachusetts assembly to appoint a committee of correspondence, to communicate with Mr. Arthur Lee, of Virginia, the colony’s agent in London, and with the Speakers of the several colonial assemblies; and though the committee had accomplished little or nothing, he had not been discouraged, but had written the next year to Mr. Lee expressing the wish that “societies” of “the most respectable inhabitants” might be formed in the colonies to maintain a correspondence with friends in England in the interest of colonial privilege. “This is a sudden thought,” he said, “and drops undigested from my pen”; but it must have seemed a natural enough thought to Mr. Lee, whose own vast correspondence,—with America, with Englishmen at home, with acquaintances on the continent,—had itself, unaided, made many a friend for the colonies over sea at the same time that it kept the leading men of the colonies informed of the opinions and the dangers breeding in England. But Mr. Adams’s town committees came first. It was left for the little group of self-constituted leaders in the Virginian assembly, of whom Richard Henry Lee, Mr. Arthur Lee’s elder brother, was one, to take the step which actually drew the colonies into active coöperation when the time was ripe. It was, in part, through the systematic correspondence set afoot by the Virginian burgesses that something like a common understanding had been arrived at as to