One day in 1772 old Governor Shirley, then living in retirement, heard that the "Boston Seat" was responsible for the opposition to Hutchinson's administration. When they told him who it was that made the Boston Seat, he is said to have replied: "Mr. Cushing I knew, and Mr. Hancock I knew, but where the devil this brace of Adamses came from I know not." He might have been told that they had risen from obscurity to inject into politics the acrid and self-righteous spirit of their Puritan ancestors. It would be interesting to inquire to what issue the quarrel with England would have been conducted had it been left to Mr. Cushing and Mr. Hancock. Half the persistent opposition of the brace of Adamses to British legislation was inspired by the commanding position of a few families in Boston--the Hutchinsons and Olivers, who "will rule and overbear in all things." As a youngster John Adams had confided to his _Diary_: "I will not ... confine myself to a chamber for nothing. I'll have some boon in return, exchange: fame, fortune, or something." Laborious days had gained him little. "Thirty seven years, more than half the life of man, are run out," he complains in 1773, "and I have my own and my children's fortunes to make." Yet there was his boyhood friend, Jonathan Sewall, already attorney-general, "rewarded ... with six thousand pounds a year, for propagating as many ... slanders against his country as ever fell from the pen of a sycophant." And the Hutchinsons and Olivers! With what concentrated bitterness does the young lawyer write of these men who, he is convinced, had submitted to be ministerial tools for the aggrandizement, of their families. His bitterness is the greater, and his conscious rectitude the more obtrusive, because he also, the virtuous Adams, might have sat in that gallery. For the wily Hutchinson had offered him the lucrative post of solicitor-general--the open road to power; but he had declined it; he could not be bought by the man "whose character and conduct have been the cause for laying a foundation for perpetual discontent and uneasiness between Britain and the colonies, of perpetual struggle of one party for wealth and power at the expense of the liberties of this country, and of perpetual contention in the other party to preserve them." Not in England was the plot hatched, but in Boston itself; and much brooding on his injuries and his abnegations had brought Adams to the pass, in 1774, that he could set down the names of the three "original conspirators."