“Mr. Samuel Adams ... happened to join the same party ... trembling and in great agitation.... The informant heard the said Samuel Adams then say ... ‘If you are men, behave like men. Let us take up arms immediately, and be free, and seize all the king’s officers. We shall have thirty thousand men to join us from the country.’ ... And before the arrival of the troops ... at the house of the informant ... the said Samuel Adams said: ‘We will not submit to any tax, nor become slaves.... The country was first settled by our ancestors, therefore we are free and want no king.’ ... The informant further sayeth, that about a fortnight before the troops arrived, the aforesaid Samuel Adams, being at the house of the informant, the informant asked him what he thought of the times. The said Adams answered, with great alertness, that, on lighting the beacon, we should be joined with thirty thousand men from the country with their knapsacks and bayonets fixed, and added, ‘We will destroy every soldier that dare put his foot on shore. His majesty has no right to send troops here to invade the country, and I look upon them as foreign enemies!’” [Footnote: Wells’s _Samuel Adams_, i. 210, 211.] Maturer reflection must have convinced him his design was impracticable, for he certainly abandoned it, and the two regiments disembarked in peace; but their position was unfortunate. Together they were barely a thousand strong, and were completely at the mercy of the populous and hostile province they had been sent to awe. The temptation to a bold and unscrupulous revolutionary leader must have been intense. Apparently it needed but a spark to cause an explosion; the rabble of Boston could be fierce and dangerous when roused, as had been proved by the sack of Hutchinson’s house; and if the soldiers could be goaded into firing on the citizens, the chances were they would be annihilated in the rising which would follow, when a rupture would be inevitable. But even supposing the militia abstained from participating in the outbreak, and the tumult were suppressed, the indignation at the slaughter would be deep enough to sustain him in making demands which the government could not grant.