In the matter of resistance the distribution of honors has been rather literary than historical. In considering the beginnings of the Revolution our minds fly at once to the Tea-party in Boston harbor, then to Lexington, where seven Massachusetts men fell dead, and seven years of war followed. But two years before the tea was thrown overboard, and four years before the Lexington massacre, North Carolinians had encountered British troops, had left two hundred patriots fallen, and seen their leaders hanged for treason. Those earliest martyrs are almost forgotten because, in the first place, North Carolina produced no historians, poets, magazines, to rehearse their story from generation to generation. In the second place, the rebellion which Governor Tryon crushed at Alamance, though against the same oppressions, occurred in 1771, before the colonies had made common cause. Governmental anachronisms have a tendency to take refuge in colonies. Had Great Britain conceded to Americans the constitutional rights of Englishmen there could have been no revolution. Before the time of George III. British governors had repeatedly revived in America prerogatives extinct in England, but the colonists had generally been successful in their appeals to the home government. Even in 1774 the old statesmen in America had not realized that a king had come who meant to begin in America his mad scheme of governing as well as reigning. When, in September, 1774, the first Continental Congress assembled, its members generally expected to settle the troubles with the "mother country" by petitions to Parliament. There is poetic irony in the fact that the first armed resistance to royal authority in America was by the North Carolina "Regulators." On the frontiers, before official courts were established, some kind of law and order had to be maintained, and they were protected by a volunteer police called "Regulators." In the forests of Virginia, two hundred years ago, Peter Lynch was appointed judge by his neighbors because of his wisdom and justice, and his decisions were enforced by "Regulators." Judge Lynch's honorable name is now degraded into a precedent for the cowardly ruffians who hunt down unarmed negroes, Italians, and Chinamen, and murder them without trial, or after their acquittal. But such was not the case with our frontier courts and "Regulators," which were civilized organizations, though unauthorized. For several years before the Revolution lawful and civilized government in some of the colonies depended on unauthorized administrations. The authorized powers were the "lynchers," as they would now be called, with traditional misrepresentation of Peter Lynch. The North Carolina Regulators of 1771 were defending the English constitution against a king and a governor acting as lawlessly as our vile lynchers and "White Caps." It was remarked, by Paine among others that after the royal authority was abolished, though for a long time new governments were not