The governor, having obtained intelligence of the manner in which the house was employed, sent his secretary with directions to dissolve the assembly. Finding the doors shut, and being refused admittance, he read the order of dissolution aloud on the staircase. The next day, the governor received an address from the principal inhabitants of Salem, at that time the metropolis of the province, which marks the deep impression made by a sense of common danger. No longer considering themselves as the inhabitants of Salem, but as Americans, and spurning advantages to be derived to themselves from the distress inflicted on a sister town, for its zeal in a cause common to all, they expressed their deep affliction for the calamities of Boston. About this time rough drafts of the two remaining bills relative to the province of Massachusetts, as well as of that for quartering troops in America, were received in Boston, and circulated through the continent. They served to confirm the wavering, to render the moderate indignant, and to inflame the violent. An agreement was framed by the committee of correspondence in Boston, entitled "a solemn league and covenant," whereby the subscribers bound themselves, "in the presence of God," to suspend all commercial intercourse with Great Britain, from the last day of the ensuing month of August, until the Boston port bill, and the other late obnoxious laws should be repealed. They also bound themselves, in the same manner, not to consume, or purchase from any other, any goods whatever which should arrive after the specified time; and to break off all dealings with the purchasers as well as with the importers of such goods. They renounced, also, all intercourse and connexion with those who should refuse to subscribe to that covenant, or to bind themselves by some similar agreement; and annexed to the renunciation of intercourse, the dangerous penalty of publishing to the world, the names of all who refused to give this evidence of attachment to the rights of their country. General Gage issued a proclamation in which he termed this covenant "an unlawful, hostile, and traitorous combination, contrary to the allegiance due to the King, destructive of the legal authority of parliament, and of the peace, good order, and safety of the community." All persons were warned against incurring the pains and penalties due to such dangerous offences; and all magistrates were charged to apprehend and secure for trial such as should be guilty of them. But the time when the proclamation of governors could command attention had passed away; and the penalties in the power of the committee of correspondence were much more dreaded than those which could be inflicted by the civil magistrate.[233] [Footnote 233: Belsham. Minot.]