John Andrews looked at the matter differently. "The officers in general behave more like a parcel of children, of late, than men. Captain ---- of the Royal Irish first exposed himself by behaving in a very scandalous manner at the South meeting.... He got pretty decently frighted for it. A woman, among the rest, attacked him and threatened to wring his nose." An outbreak may have been what the officers wanted. "But," says Samuel Adams, who acted on his maxim that it is good politics to put and keep the enemy in the wrong, "order was restored, and we proceeded regularly, and finished the business. I am persuaded, were it not for the danger of precipitating a crisis, not a man of them would have been spared."[54] The whole was a type of the existing situation. Here were the officers, still causing petty disturbances; here too, no doubt, were Tories, contemptuous of the proceedings. Deeper still appears the real significance of the occasion. On the one side was the governor, unable, with all the power of the king, to prevent a meeting of the citizens to condemn his presence in the town--for the meeting was the "Port Bill meeting," adjourned from time to time since the previous May. And on the other side were the citizens, legally protesting and exasperatingly defiant, evidently under perfect self-restraint, determined not to strike the first blow. The officers took, as usual, a puerile revenge in the form of a burlesque. "A vast number" of them assembled at the Coffee House in King Street, and chose selectmen and an orator, "who deliver'd an oration from the balcony to a crowd of few else beside gaping officers."[55] Others of them caught a countryman who had been decoyed into buying a musket from a soldier, and tarred and feathered him. But these were surface trivialities. Beneath them the true situation was growing worse. Out in the country military stores were being collected at Worcester and at Concord; and over in Parliament the fisheries bill, designed to deprive thousands in America of their living, was sure of passing. At last Franklin, who had stayed in London as long as there seemed anything for him to accomplish, patiently bearing humiliation and insults, on the 20th of March took ship for Philadelphia. It was the sign that there was no further hope of peace. FOOTNOTES: [46] Bancroft. [47] Adams Letters, 39. [48] Andrews Letters. [49] A Sermon preached at Lexington, April 19, 1776, 26. [50] His diary is published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for April and May, 1877, 384 and 544. I shall use it freely without further definite reference. [51] Frothingham's "Life of Warren," 413 [52] Bulletin of Boston Public Library, x, No. 87, 320. [53] Frothingham's "Life of Warren," 435-436. [54] Wells, "Life of Adams," ii, 281. [55] Andrews Letters. CHAPTER VII MILITARY PREPARATIONS