What is there to be said, either by way of explanation or of justification, of the course ascribed to the patriots? It is well to admit freely that there was much said, if not done, that had the seeming of duplicity and insincerity, of secrecy of design and of sinuous dealing. And after yielding all that can be charged of this, we may insist that, in reality, it was nothing beyond the seeming. Neither disguise, nor duplicity, nor hypocrisy, nor artful or cunning intrigue, in any shape or degree, was availed of by the patriots. The result to which they were led was from the first natural and inevitable, and it was reached by bold and honest stages, in thinking out and making sure of their way. The facts are all clearly revealed to us in their course of development. The maturing of opinion, till what had been repelled as a calamity was accepted as a necessity, is traceable through the changing events of a few heavily burdened years, if not even of months and days, to say nothing of the symptoms of it which a keen perception may discover during the career of four generations of Englishmen on this continent. Its own natural stages of growth were reached just at the time that it was attempted to bring it under check by artificial restraint of the home government. That government compelled the colonists to ask themselves the two questions: first, if they were anything less than Englishmen; and further, if their natural rights were any less than those of men. There has been much discussion as to when and by whom the idea of American independence was first entertained. It would be very difficult to assign that conception to a date or to an individual. All that was natural and spontaneous in the situation of the colonists would be suggestive of it; all that was artificial, like the tokens of a foreign oversight in matters of government, would be exceptional or strange to it. Husbandmen, mechanics, and fishermen would not be likely to trouble themselves with the ways in which their relations as British subjects interfered with their free range in life. Larger and deeper thinkers, like Samuel Adams, would feel their way down to comprehensive root questions, sure at last to reach the fundamentals of the whole matter,—as, What has the British ministry and Parliament to do with us? It required nine years to mature the puzzling of a peasant over the question of a trifling tax into the conclusion of a republican patriot statesman. Every stage of this process is traceable in abounding public and private papers, with its advances and arrests, its pauses and its quickenings, its misgivings and assurances, in all classes of persons, and in its dimmest and its fullest phases. We have seen how it was working its way in the honest secrecy of a few breasts in the first Congress, even when repelled as a dreaded fatality. Samuel Adams is generally, and with sufficient evidence, credited as having been the first of the leading spirits of the revolt to have reached—at