The remarkable parallel between Hamilton and the younger Pitt begins in this year, while both are in the schoolroom. Hamilton "in the Fields" recalls Pitt at the bar of the House of Lords, amazing his companions with the ripe intelligence and rare sagacity with which he followed the debate, and the readiness with which he skilfully formulated answers to the stately arguments of the wigged and powdered nobles. Pitt, under the tuition of his distinguished father, was fitted for the House of Commons as boys are fitted for college at Exeter and Andover, and he entered Parliament before becoming of age. Hamilton's preparation had been different. At twelve years of age he was a clerk in a counting house on the island of Nevis in the West Indies; at sixteen he entered a grammar school in New Jersey; at seventeen he became a sophomore at King's College. It is then that he spoke "in the Fields"--not as a sophomore, not as a precocious youth with unripe thoughts, not as a boy orator--but as a man speaking with the wisdom of genius. After the meeting "in the Fields" patriotism proved stronger than prejudice, and in November, 1774, the Committee of Fifty-one gave place to a Committee of Sixty, charged with carrying out recommendations of the Continental Congress. Soon after a Committee of One Hundred, composed of members of the Committees of Fifty and Fifty-one, assumed the functions of a municipal government. Finally, in May, 1775, representatives were chosen from the several counties to organise a Provincial Congress to take the place of the long established legislature of the Colony, which had become so steeped in toryism that it refused to recognise the action of any body of men who resented the tyranny of Parliament. Thus, in the brief space of eighteen months, the government of the Crown had been turned into a government of the people.