The Selectmen of Boston, on issuing the usual warrants for an election of Representatives, requested General Mackay to order the troops out of town on the day (May 8, 1769) of the town-meeting; but though he felt obliged to decline to do this, yet, in the spirit in which he acted during his entire residence here, he kept the troops, on this day, confined to their barracks. The town, after choosing Otis, Cushing, Adams, and Hancock as Representatives, adopted a noble letter of instructions, not only rehearsing the grievances, but asserting ideas of freedom and equality, as to political rights, that had been firmly grasped. They arraigned the Act of Parliament of 4th Geo. III., extending admiralty jurisdiction and depriving the colonists of native juries, as a distinction staring them in the face which was made between the subject in Great Britain and the subject in America,--the Parliament in one section guarding the people of the realm, and securing to them trial by jury and the law of the land, and in the next section depriving Americans of those important rights; and this distinction was pronounced a brand of disgrace upon every American, a degradation below the rank of an Englishman. While the instructions claimed for each subject in America equality of political right with each subject in England, they claimed also for the General Court the dignity of a free assembly, and declared the first object of their labors to be a removal of "those cannon and guards and that clamorous parade that had been daily about the Court-House since the arrival of His Majesty's troops." The country towns, which now responded so nobly to the demand of the hour, were controlled by freemen. Among these it was rare to find any who could not read and write; they were mostly independent freeholders, with person and property guarded, as it used to be said in the Boston journals of the time, not by one law for the peasant and another law for the prince, but by equal law for all; they exercised liberty of thought and political action, and their proceedings, as they appeared in the public prints, gave great alarm to the Governor. He now informed Lord Hillsborough that the Sons of Liberty had got as high as ever; and that out of a party which used to keep the opposition to Government under, there were reckoned to be not above ten members returned in a House of above one hundred and twenty. After giving an account of a meeting of "the factious chiefs" in Boston, held a few days before the General Court assembled, he says,--"To see that faction which has occasioned all the troubles in this Province, and I may add in America too, has quite overturned this government, now triumphant and driving over every one who has loyalty and resolution to stand up in defence of the rights of the King and Parliament, gives me great concern."