of the Commissioners in this case, Hutchinson pleaded a want of power, under the Constitution, to comply with their demand. "They did not consider the Constitution," he remarked, "and that by the Charter I can do nothing without the Council, the major part of whom are against me, and the civil magistrates, many of whom made a part of the body which was to be suppressed; so that there could not have been a worse occasion [to call out the troops], and I think anything tragical would have set the whole Province in a flame, and maybe spread farther." Thus Hutchinson, as well as Franklin, dreaded the effect of a serious collision between the citizens and the troops. At this time the feeling was one of sullen acquiescence in their presence. "Molineaux," he says, February 18, 1770, "to whom the Sons of Liberty have given the name of Paoli, and some others, are restless; but there seems to be no disposition to any general muster of the people again." And yet the newspapers were now crowded with unusually exciting matter, and so continued up to the first week in March: articles about the Liberty-Pole in New York being cut down by the military and replaced in a triumphal procession by the people; about McDougal's imprisonment for printing free comments on the Assembly for voting supplies to the troops; the famous address of "Junius" to the King, in which one count is his alienation of a people who left their native land for freedom and found it in a desert; the details of the shooting, by an informer, of Christopher Snider, the son of a poor German, and of the imposing funeral, which moved from the Liberty-Tree to the burial-place. The importers now feared an assault on their houses; whereupon soldiers were allowed as a guard to some, while others slept with loaded guns at their bedsides. These things deserve to be borne in mind; for they show how much there was to exasperate, when the popular leaders were called upon to meet a paroxysm without a precedent in the Colonies.