{260}lating arguments against taxation, was received with loud acclaim. Alarmed at the progress of opposition in the colonies, Hillsborough, the colonial secretary, sent forth his countervailing circulars. Governor Penn was instructed to enjoin the Assembly to regard the Massachusetts circular as seditious and of a dangerous tendency, and to prorogue the Assembly if they should countenance it. The Assembly, firm in the right cause, practically asserted their privilege to correspond with the other colonies, and they heartily seconded the proposition of Virginia for a union of the provinces in a respectful petition to the king for a redress of grievances. Leagues, non-importation agreements, committees of correspondence, and other revolutionary machinery, such as were zealously engaged in New England, were equally active in Pennsylvania; and when the British government poured all its wrath upon Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, in word and deed, stood up as the bold champion and sympathizing friend of the New Englanders. Its course was more temperate than its sister colony, but not less firm. While a convention at Philadelphia recommended the people of Boston to try all lenient measures for relief, they assured them that "the people of Pennsylvania would continue firmly to adhere to the cause of American liberty." In December, 1773, two of the "detested tea-ships" sailed up the Delaware as far as Gloucester Point. There they were ordered to anchor, and to proceed no further, at their peril. The authority acting on the occasion was a committee from a meeting of full eight thousand persons, then congregated in the State House yard. They allowed the captain of one of the ships (the Polly) to go up to the city and witness the manifested feelings of the people, by which he might determine which was the wiser course to pursue, to persist in landing the tea, or to weigh anchor for Europe. He chose the latter, and in the mean time the consignees of the tea were all forced to resign. In November, the following year, the brig Greyhound, bound to Philadelphia with a cargo of tea, landed at Greenwich, on the Jersey shore. There the cargo was discharged, and placed in the cellar of a house standing in front of the market grounds. On the evening of the 22d, about fifty men, disguised as Indians, took the chests from the cellar, piled them in a neighboring field, and burned them. Suits were brought against some of the leading young men who were engaged in this transaction, but the war breaking out, and courts of justice being abolished or suspended, they were abandoned. *