t was a legitimate and perfectly
fair way of raising money from a taxable people. It was neither
legitimate nor fair when imposed upon unrepresented colonists. But if
it had been the sanest and most statesmanlike scheme for raising money
ever conceived by a financier, it would have deserved and would have
received no less hostility from the American people. The principle
involved was everything. To admit in any degree the right of Great
Britain to impose at her pleasure a tax upon the colonists was to
surrender in ignominy the privileges and to betray the duties of free
men. Any expectations of colonial protest that the Ministry may have
allowed themselves to entertain were more than fulfilled. Colony after
colony, great town after great town, great man after great man, made
haste to protest with an emphasis that should have been significant
against the new measure. Boston led the way. Boston's most
distinguished citizen, Boston's most respected son was the voice not
merely of his town, not merely of his State, but of the colonial
continent. Ten years later the name of Samuel Adams was known, hated,
and honored on the English side of the Atlantic.

[Sidenote: 1765--Samuel Adams]

Samuel Adams was one of those men whom Nature forges to be the
instruments of revolution. His three-and-forty years had taught him
much: the value of silence, the knowledge of men, the desire to change
the world and the patience to bide his time. A few generations earlier
he might have made a right-hand man to Cromwell and held a place in the
heart of Hampden. On the very threshold of his manhood, when receiving
his degree of Master of Arts at Harvard, he asserted his defiant
democracy in a dissertation on the right of the people of a
commonwealth to combine against injustice on the part of the head of
the State. The badly dressed man with the grave firm face of a Pilgrim
Father was as ready and as resolute to oppose King George as any Pym or
Vane had been ready and resolute to oppose Charles Stuart. He had at
one {90} time devoted himself to a commercial career, with no great
success. He was made for a greater game than commerce; he had the
temper and he gained the training for a public life, and the hour when
it came found that the man was ready. When the citizens of Boston met
to protest against the Stamp Act Samuel Adams framed the first
resolutions that denied to the Parliament of Great Britain the right to
impose taxes u