"An armed truce", wrote Benjamin Church, "is the sole tenure by which the inhabitants of Boston possess life, liberty, and property." Away from Boston, the towns made common cause. "Liberty and Union" was to be read on a flag flying in Taunton. When news of these and similar events reached England, Lord North told Hutchinson that, for aught he could see, it must come to violence, with consequent subjection for the province.[332] When such tidings reached Virginia it found her officers just sheathing their swords after their conflict with the Indians in the mountains, and resolving next to turn their weapons against the oppressors of America. Gage, in Boston, whom Warren really felt to be honest and desirous of an accommodation, was awaking to a juster measure of the task of the ministry, which might, he said, require 20,000 troops to begin with. As he pondered on such views, he might have heard, on the evening of the 9th of November, 1774, the ringing of the bells which greeted the return of Sam. Adams and his colleagues from the Philadelphia congress. Shortly after the middle of the month the British in Boston went into winter quarters.[333] So November passed;—the Committee of Safety had arranged to raise and support an army, and the recommendation of the Continental Congress had been approved. December came. Boston was not yet burned, as some in London believed it was when Quincy heard them laying wagers in the coffee-houses,[334] and if Sam. Adams was not the first politician in the world, as others told the same ardent young Bostonian, he was sharing conspicuous honors at home, with his distant kinsman, John Adams. The latter, as Novanglus, in his public controversy with the unknown Massachusettensis, was just attracting renewed attention. But that sturdy patriot, while he was arguing in public, was comforting himself in private by reckoning that Massachusetts could put 25,000 men in the field in a week; and New England, he counted, had 200,000 fighting men, "not exact soldiers", he confessed, "but all used to arms."[335] Tidings were coming in which told how this warlike spirit might be tested. Governor Wanton, of Rhode Island, had spirited away from the reach of the British naval officers forty-four cannon, which were at Newport. Paul Revere had gone down to Portsmouth and harangued the Sons of Liberty, till they invaded Fort William and Mary and (December 14, 1774) carried off the powder and cannon.[336] From Maryland, where they had lately been burning a tea-ship,[337] the word was that its convention had ordered the militia to be enrolled. From Pennsylvania it appeared that Thomas Mifflin was conspicuous among the Quakers in advocating the measure of non-intercourse. From South Carolina the news was halting. Could her rice-planters succeed in getting their product excepted from such a plan? They did. Gage had some time before[338] written to Dartmouth that they were as mad in the southern Charlestown as in northern