consequences to Man as any that ever struck in his history.” Though British officers were ignorant of the means by which Gage was to assail American freedom, the provincials already knew, and were prepared. The lanterns in North Church tower had signaled their message to watchers in Charlestown, and Revere and Dawes were already on their separate ways, when eight hundred grenadiers and light infantrymen landed at East Cambridge and crossed the marshland to the road that led to Lexington and Concord. At dawn the Minute Men were alive to the warning given by bells and drums that the enemy was approaching; three score or more answered the call to arms on Lexington Green--“a little band of farmers on their own training-field, facing the veteran ranks of the king.… Their homes, their property, personal and communal, and their rights as freemen were threatened; they were patriots and heroes, everyone.” Commanded with threats and oaths to lay down his arms, Captain Parker of the militia cried to his men: “Don’t fire unless you are fired on; but if they want a war, let it begin here.” In the ensuing assault several militiamen fell, wounded to the death. The blood they spilled baptized the cause of Freedom in a new land. Resolved to die rather than submit, their martyrdom fixed the resolution of all their brothers in the Colonies. Here, three-quarters of a century later, in “the birthplace of American liberty,” Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot, eulogized “the embattled farmers” of immortal memory in these eloquent phrases: “It is their sacrificed blood in which is written the preface of your nation’s history. Their death was and ever will be the first bloody revelation of America’s destiny, and Lexington the opening scene of a revolution destined to change the character of human governments, and the condition of the human race.” “The Minute Man of the Revolution!” exclaims George William Curtis. “And who was he? He was the husband and father, who left the plough in the furrow, the hammer on the bench, and, kissing wife and children, marched to die or be free!… This was the Minute Man of the Revolution! The rural citizen, trained in the common school, the town meeting, who carried a bayonet that _thought_, and whose gun, loaded with a principle, brought down, not a man, but a system!” A youth who fought the king’s men that wonderful day described how they pushed the British back from Concord Bridge, back through Lincoln, Arlington, Cambridge and Somerville to the Charles. “What could be more pleasing to ambition,” he wrote, “than to knock off the shackles of despotism? Freedom was the hobby I mounted, sword in hand, neck or nothing, life or death. I will be one to support my country’s rights and gain its independence!”