The political winds, however, do not seem to have been damaging any body or thing but the Governor and his cause. During the month of October the crown officials urged the local authorities to billet the troops in the town; but this demand was quietly and admirably met by setting against it the law of the land as interpreted by just men. The press was now of signal service; and all through this period of seventeen months, though it severely arraigned the advocates of arbitrary power, yet it ever urged submission to the law. "It is always safe to adhere to the law," are the grand words of the "Boston Gazette," October 17, 1768, "and to keep every man of every denomination and character within its bounds. Not to do this would be in the highest degree imprudent. What will it be but to depart from the straight line, to give up the law and the Constitution, which is fixed and stable, and is the collected and long-digested sentiment of the whole, and to substitute in its place the opinion of individuals, than which nothing can be more uncertain?" These words were penned by Samuel Adams, and freedom never had a more unselfish advocate; they fell upon a community that was discussing in every home the gravest of political questions; and they were responded to with a prudence and order that were warmly eulogized both in America and England. This respect for Law, when Liberty was as a live coal from a divine altar, adhered to so faithfully for years, in spite, too, of goadings by those who wielded British power, but forgot American right, must be regarded as remarkable. Until the close of Bernard's administration, the town, to use contemporary words, was surprisingly quiet; but during the remainder of the period of the seventeen months, when selfish importers broke their agreement and set themselves against what was considered to be the public safety, they provoked disturbances and even mobs. Still, in an age when, to use Hutchinson's words, "mobs of a certain sort were constitutional," the wonder is, not that there were any, but that there were not more of them in Boston. Besides, the concern of the popular leaders to preserve order was so deep and their action so prompt, that disturbances were checked and suppressed without the use of the military on a single occasion; and hence the injury done both to persons and property was so small, when compared with the bloodshed and destruction by contemporary British mobs, that what Colonel Barre said of the June riots in Boston was true of the outbreaks at the close of this period, namely, that they but mimicked the mobs of the mother-country.