The November riots disposed of the stamps but not of the Stamp Act. Business had to go on as usual without stamps or cease altogether. Either course would make the law of no effect; but the latter course would be a strictly constitutional method of resistance, while the former would involve a violation of law. Many preferred the constitutional method. Let the courts adjourn, they said, and offices remain vacant; let print-shops close, and ships lie in harbor: English merchants will soon enough feel the pressure of slack business and force ministers to another line of conduct. A good plan enough for the man of independent fortune, for the judge whose income was assured, or the thrifty merchant who, signing a non-importation agreement, had laid in a stock of goods to be sold at high prices. But the wage-earner, the small shopkeeper who was soon sold out, the printer who lived on his weekly margin of profit, the rising lawyer whose income rose or fell with his fees: such men were of another mind. The inactivity of the courts "will make a large chasm in my affairs, if it should not reduce me to distress," John Adams confides to his _Diary_ in December; and adds naively that he was just on the point of winning a reputation and a competence "when this execrable project was set on foot for my ruin as well as that of my country." Men who saw their incomes dwindle were easily disposed to think that the cessation of business was an admission of the legitimacy of the law, a kind of betrayal of the cause. And it was to counteract the influence of lukewarm conservatives, men who were content to "turn and shift, to luff up, and bear away," that those who regarded themselves as the only true patriots, uniting in an association of the Sons of Liberty, set about the task of "putting business in motion again in the usual channels without stamps."