Looking back to those times during later years, John Adams wrote: "The poor people themselves, who, by _secret manoeuvres_, _are excited to insurrection_, are seldom aware of the purposes for which they are set in motion or of consequences which may happen to themselves; and _when once heated and in full career_, _they can neither manage themselves nor be managed by others_." [Illustration: BOSTONIANS PAYING THE EXCISEMAN, OR TARRING AND FEATHERING. A cartoon published in London in 1771, showing how the authority of the government was wholly disregarded in Boston.] The illegal seizure of the tea was in a certain sense parallel to the so-called "respectable" mob which on the 11th of August, 1834, destroyed the Charlestown convent, and, a year later, nearly killed Garrison and made the jail his only safe place of refuge. Had slavery triumphed, that mob would at this day be the object and the subject of popular glorification; every man who belonged to it, who was present abetting and encouraging it, would claim his share of the glory, and a roll of honor would have been handed down for a centennial celebration in which every slaveholder in the land would have borne a part. But now that slavery is dead, and the statue of Garrison has its place in the fashionable avenue of Boston, there is no longer any merit in the endeavor to buttress the fallen cause. Had the Revolution failed, the disgrace of the men who threw the tea overboard would never have been removed, and the best that history could say of them would be that, like the Attucks mob, they were enthusiasts without reason. John Hancock, one of the principal leaders of the Tea Party Mob, and the owner of the sloop "Liberty," which was seized for smuggling, and later the first to sign the Declaration of Independence, inherited £70,000 from his uncle, who had made a large part of it by importing from the Dutch island of St. Eustacia great quantities of tea, in molasses hogsheads, and, by the importation of a few chests from England, had freed the rest from suspicion, and not having been found out, had borne the reputation of a "fair trader." Partly by inattention to his private affairs, and partly from want of sound judgment, John Hancock became greatly involved and distressed, and his estate was lost with much greater rapidity than it had been acquired by his uncle.[32] [32] His. Mass. Bay, page 207. John Adams had very positive opinions concerning the mobs of the Revolution. In a letter to his wife he says: