The King's speech, threatening resolves adopted in Parliament, startling avowals in the direction of arbitrary power uttered in the debates, gave fresh significance to the quartering of troops in Boston, and forced upon the Patriots the conviction that these troops were not here merely to aid in maintaining a public peace that was not disturbed, or in collecting revenue that was regularly paid, but were indicative of a purpose in the Ministry to change their local government, and subjugate them, as to their domestic affairs, to foreign-imposed law. "My daily reflections for two years," says John Adams, who lived near Murray's Barracks, "at the sight of those soldiers before my door, were serious enough. Their very appearance in Boston was a strong proof to me that the determination in Great Britain to subjugate us was too deep and inveterate ever to be altered by us; for everything we could do was misrepresented, and nothing we could say was credited." This statement is abundantly confirmed by contemporary facts. Nothing that the Patriots could say availed to diminish the alarm which was felt by the British aristocracy at the obvious tendency of the democratic principle. The progress of events but revealed new grandeur in the ideas of freedom and equality that had been here so intelligently grasped, and new capacities in the republican forms in which they had found expression. This was growth. The mode prescribed to check this growth was a change in the local Constitution, and this would be "the introduction of absolute rule" in Massachusetts. The voluminous correspondence, at this period, between the members of the British Cabinet and Governor Bernard shows that this purpose of changing the Constitution was entertained by the Ministers and was warmly urged by the local crown officials. Thus, John Pownall, the Under-Secretary, avowed in a letter addressed to the Governor, that such a measure was necessary, and that such "had been long his firm and unalterable opinion upon the fullest consideration of what had passed in America"; and in the same letter be says that the Government had under consideration "the forfeiture of the Charter and measures of local regulation and reform."