porters; in America the office-holding class, the "best families,"
the people of settled income and vested rights, were as a rule,
selfishly or unselfishly, for the king. Already "mobocracy," "the
faction," "sedition," were familiar terms among them. England was ready
to take, and the American Tories were ready to applaud, the next step.
And Boston was being marked down as the most obnoxious of the towns of
America.[16]

FOOTNOTES:

[10] The adjectives are those of _Massachusettensis_, the ablest Tory
pamphleteer, as quoted in Frothingham's "Siege," 33.

[11] "Memorial History of Boston," iii, 5.

[12] "Memorial History of Boston," iii, 7.

[13] Bancroft's "United States," v, 247.

[14] Fiske, "American Revolution," illustrated edition, i, 17.

[15] Bancroft's "United States," v, 203.

[16] The Castle, or Castle William, referred to in this chapter, was the
old fort on Castle Island. It was never put to any other use than as a
barracks and magazine.

CHAPTER III

CHARLES TOWNSHEND, SAM ADAMS, AND THE MASSACRE

Unfortunately, when the Stamp Act was repealed, the way had been left
open for future trouble. The Rockingham ministry, the most liberal which
could then be assembled, even in repealing the Stamp Act thought it
incumbent upon them to assert, in the Declaratory Act, the right to tax
America. The succeeding ministry, called together under the failing
Pitt, was the means of reasserting the right. Pitt, too ill to support
the labor of leading his party in the Commons, entered the House of
Lords as Earl of Chatham, thus acknowledging the eclipse of fame and
abilities which in the previous reign had astounded Europe. It was
during one of his periods of illness, when he was unable to attend to
public affairs, that a subordinate insubordinately reversed his public
policy by proceeding once more to tax America.

Charles Townshend was Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was he who had
urged the reenactment of the Sugar Act in 1763, and he now saw
opportunity to put through a more radical policy. In violation of all
implied pledges, disdaining restraint from his colleagues, this
brilliant but unstable politician introduced into Parliament a new bill
for raising an American revenue. "I am still,"[17] he declared, "a firm
advocate of the Stamp Act.... I laugh at the absurd distinction between
internal and external taxation.... It is a distinction without a
difference; if we have a right to impose the one, we