"an elegant oration," of course by the Grand Master, and a joyous, festive season.

Soon after this masonic promotion, Warren took part in the great town-meeting which was occasioned by the firing of the troops on the citizens, when the sixteen-months' question of their removal was forced to a conclusion.

I have mentioned the departure from the town of the Sixty-fourth and Sixty-fifth Regiments, leaving the Fourteenth and the Twenty-ninth. Their general, Mackay, soon after, left for England; when the command devolved on Lieutentant-colonel Dalrymple, under whom they landed. He said that the arrival of the land and naval forces was the most seasonable thing that was ever known. "Had we not," he wrote to Commodore Hood, "arrived so critically, the worst that could be apprehended must have happened.' Hood, who had returned to Halifax, characterized Dalrymple as a very excellent officer, quite the gentleman, knowing the world, having a good address, and with all the fire, judgment, coolness, integrity, and firmness that a man could possess.

This military force was sufficiently large to be a perpetual fret to the citizens, but too small to render essential service in case of an insurrection; and the Crown officials thought it best to refrain from making arrests. The popular leaders, with touching declarations of loyalty to the king, averred that they aimed

Accepted Masons in Scotland, on Wednesday, was solemnized, at a Grand Lodge of Ancient, Free, and Accepted Masons in this town, held at Masons' Hall, the instalment of the Most Worshipful Joseph Warren, Esq., provincial Grand Master of Ancient, Free, and Accepted Masons in North America. On the occasion, there was an elegant oration. After the instalment, there was a grand entertainment. - Boston Gazette, Jan. 1, 1770.

only at a change of the measures of the Administration. The Tories, however, continued to represent the town to be a nest of disorder and rebellion. Hutchinson, when the executive responsibility rested upon him, seems to have felt that this misrepresentation had been carried to a suicidal extent; for he now advised Lord Hillsborough, that, "in matters that had no relation to the dispute between the kingdom and the colonies, Government retained its vigor, and the administration of it was attended by no unusual difficulty." This is high authority, and the evidence is to the point and conclusive. The same truth was urged by the popular leaders in calm and candid reasonings. In appeals to public opinion, made through the board of selectmen, the town-meeting, the legislature, and the council, they analyzed the events of the Eighteenth of March, to show that they were trivial; and held that the riots of the Tenth of June and other tumults were exceptional: they also pointed to the good order of the town as habitual and general; and claimed that, in their political action, they had not taken a single unconstitutional step. It was a marvel to them, that the ministry, to use the words of Samuel Adams, should employ troops only "to parade the streets of Boston, and, by their ridiculous merry-andrew tricks, to become the objects of contempt of the women and children."

Much had occurred, for sixteen months, in connection with the troops, to irritate the inhabitants. Horse-racing on the Common, by the soldiers on Sundays, and military parades in the streets, grated on the feelings of a church-going people; and formal complaints were made to the commanders, on one

occasion, that the Yankee tune, "Yankee Doodle," and, on another, "Nancy Dawson," was played by the band, about meeting-time, by order of officers. These practices, however, were stopped. High-spirited citizens, on being challenged in their walks by the sentinels, could not control their temper; the violent would have their say; there were many personal quarrels; yet, in all the brawls between the citizens and the soldiers, fist had been met with fist, and club with club, and not a gun had been fired in an affray. Often cases were carried into the courts. The presence of this force was deplored on purely local grounds. "The troops," Dr. Cooper said (Jan. 1, 1770), "greatly corrupt our morals, and are in every sense an oppression. May Heaven soon deliver us from this great evil!"

During this period, the exigency that would justify the troops in firing on the people was acutely discussed in the journals. "What shall I say?" runs an article in the "Gazette." "I shudder at the thought. Surely no provincial magistrate could be found so steeled against the sensations of humanity and justice as wantonly to order troops to fire on an unarmed populace, and more than repeat in Boston the tragic scene exhibited in St. George's Fields." Hutchinson, in a letter, states the conclusions that were reached: "Our heroes for liberty say that no troops dare to fire on the people without the order of the civil magistrate, and that no civil magistrate would dare to give such orders. In the first part of their opinion, they may be right; in the second, they cannot be sure until they have made the trial." It was feared that such a step would produce a collision between the citizens and

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the troops. "I have been in constant panic," Franklin wrote to Dr. Cooper, "since I heard of troops assembling in Boston, lest the madness of mobs, or the interference of soldiers, or both, when too near each other, might occasion some mischief difficult to be prevented or repaired, and which might spread far and wide."

Hutchinson had the same fears, and repeatedly refused to use the troops to repress popular agitation. On one occasion, when the merchants were holding a public meeting in Faneuil Hall, on matters connected with the non-importation agreement, prominent Tories urged that it was best to bring things to a crisis; and that chronic local irritant, the commissioners of the customs, now more odious than ever by the assault of one of them on Otis, said, that "there could not be a better time to try the strength of the Government." The nature of the assembly may be inferred from the high character of its presiding officer, William Phillips, of educational fame as well as revolutionary renown. Hutchinson shrunk from directing the foreign bayonet against such a public meeting. He said that many of the civil magistrates made a part of the body that was to be suppressed, and that there could not have been a worse occasion to call out the troops. "I think," are his words, "any thing tragical would have set the whole province in a flame, and may be spread farther."

The fears expressed by Franklin and Hutchinson, of a general movement, show that the events which were transpiring in Boston had more than a local bearing. When the king, in a speech from the throne, repeated the calumny as to disobedience to

law, that was uttered by the local Crown officials, in their letters, it is not strange that the patriots in the colonies regarded the town as a type of their cause, and that all eyes were turned on this question of a removal of the troops. "In this day of constitutional light," a New-York essay, reprinted in a Boston journal, runs, "it is monstrous that troops should be kept, not to protect the right, but to enslave the continent."

During the last portion of February and the first days of March, the Boston journals contained an uncommon quantity of inflammatory matter: among it, relations of the cutting-down the Liberty Pole in New York by the military, and its replacement by the people; of McDougal's imprisonment there, for free comment in the press, on the New-York assembly, because it voted supplies for the British troops; the funeral, in Boston, of the boy Snider, who was killed by an informer; and the great letter of Junius to the king. The bitterness between the citizens and soldiers was now very great. The feeling also was strong against Tory importers, who feared an assault in their houses, and slept with loaded guns by their bedsides. Some of them were allowed a file of soldiers to protect them. These facts show the inflamed state of the public mind, when the leaders of both political parties were called on to meet a paroxysm without a parallel in the former history of the colonies.

The Fourteenth Regiment was quartered in Murray's Barracks, which were but a short distance north of King Street, and near the Brattle-street Church; the Twenty-ninth Regiment was quartered in Water