The crisis which thus threatened--in the mind of Samuel Adams--was not an ordinary one: no mere complication of affairs, or creaking of worn-out institutions, or honest difference of opinion about the expediency or the legality of measures. It was a crisis engendered deliberately by men of evil purpose, public enemies well known and often named. Samuel Adams, who had perhaps not heard of even one of the many materialistic interpretations of history, thought of the past as chiefly instructive in connection with certain great epochal conflicts between Liberty and Tyranny--a political Manicheanism, in which the principle of Liberty was embodied in the virtuous many and the principle of Tyranny in the wicked few. Those who read history must know it for a notorious fact that ancient peoples had lost their liberties at the hands of designing men, leagued and self-conscious conspirators against the welfare of the human race. Thus the yoke was fastened upon the Romans, "millions ... enslaved by a few." Now, in the year 1771, another of these epochal conflicts was come upon the world, and Samuel Adams, living in heroic days, was bound to stand in the forefront of the virtuous against "restless Adversaries ... forming the most dangerous Plans for the Ruin of the Reputation of the People, in order to build their own Greatness upon the Destruction of their liberties." A superficial observer might easily fall into the error of supposing that the restless adversaries and designing conspirators against whom patriots had to contend were all in England; on the contrary, the most persistent enemies of Liberty were Americans residing in the midst of the people whom they sought to despoil. One might believe that in England "the general inclination is to wish that we may preserve our liberties; and perhaps even the ministry could for some reasons find it in their hearts to be willing that we should be restored to the state we were in before the passing of the Stamp Act." Even Lord Hillsborough, richly meriting the "curses of the disinterested and better part of the colonists," was by no means "to be reckoned the most inveterate and active of all the Conspirators against our rights. There are others on this side of the Atlantick who have been more insidious in plotting the Ruin of our Liberties than even he, and they are the more infamous, because the country they would enslave, is that very Country in which (to use the words of their Adulators and Expectants) they were 'born and educated.'" Of all these restless adversaries and infamous plotters of ruin, the chief, in the mind of Samuel Adams, was probably Mr. Thomas Hutchinson.