Accordingly, a town meeting assembled in Faneuil Hall, October 28, and adjourned November 2d. Samuel Adams moved "that a committee of correspondence be appointed, to consist of twenty-one persons, to state the rights of the colonies, and of this province in particular, as men, as Christians, and as subjects; to communicate and publish the same to the several towns in this province and to the world, as the sense of this town, with the infringements and violations thereof that have been, or from time to time may be, made; also requesting of each town a free communication of their sentiments on this subject."[126] This was the beginning of an organization (November 22), entered into with hesitation by some of the leading patriots of Boston, which finally secured the public confidence, and became a great power for the concentration of popular sentiment. [Illustration: PRINTED PAGE. Slightly reduced from an original in the Boston Public Library.—ED.] It undoubtedly led to the larger measure of intercolonial correspondence instituted by Virginia during the next spring; and not the least of its claims to consideration is the fact that it engaged the attention and secured the services of Joseph Warren as the trusted lieutenant of Samuel Adams.[127] The American Revolution rests upon grounds so high and clear, and was carried forward by measures so honorably conceived and so persistently adhered to, that all who adopt its principles must regret any circumstance in its history by which the opinion of candid people is divided. Such a division is found in connection with the Hutchinson letters. The story is briefly this:—In the years 1768 and 1769 Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver, then officers in Massachusetts, appointed by the crown, and sworn to a faithful discharge of their duties, with several other persons, in a private correspondence with Thomas Whately, an English gentleman, formerly, but not then, connected with the government, communicated facts about colonial affairs the truth of which has never been impugned, and expressed opinions which Tories might honestly entertain. These letters in some unexplained manner found their way—either from the cabinet of the person to whom they were addressed, after his death, or, as is more likely, from the papers of George Grenville, to whom Whately had probably entrusted them for perusal—into the hands of Franklin, the colony agent in London, by whom they were sent in 1773, with an unsigned letter, to the speaker of the Massachusetts House. The injunctions in respect to them were loosely regarded, and they were published by a breach of faith which implicated a large body of men. They were made the basis of a petition by the General Court to the king for the removal of their writers from the offices which they held; but after a hearing before the Privy Council, January 29, 1774, the petition, which the province did not attempt to support by evidence, was dismissed as "groundless,