from the madness of mobs
or the insolence of soldiers. The Loyalists, in this public order, saw
the wholesome terror with which military force had imbued the community;
they said this "had prevented, if it had not put a final period to, its
most pestilential town-meetings": but they termed this quiet "only a
truce procured from the dread of the bayonet"; and they held that
nothing would reach and suppress the rising spirit of independence but a
radical stroke at the democratic element in the local Constitution. They
relied on physical force to carry out such a policy, and hence they
looked on the demand of the people for a withdrawal of the troops as
equivalent to a demand for the abandonment of their policy and the
abdication of the Government. The partial removal already made caused
great chagrin. The report, at first, was hardly credited in British
political circles, and, when confirmed, was construed into inability,
inconsistency, and concession by the Administration, and a sign that
things were growing worse in America.

General Gage had withdrawn the Sixty-Fourth and Sixty-Fifth Regiments,
the detachment of the Fifty-Ninth, and the company of artillery, which
left the Fourteenth Regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel Dalrymple and the
Twenty-Ninth under Lieutenant-Colonel Carr,--the two regiments which
Lord North termed "the Sam Adams Regiments,"--not enough, if the
Ministers intended to govern by military force, and too many, if they
did not intend this. They continued under General Mackay until he left
for England, when the command devolved on Lieutenant-Colonel Dalrymple,
the senior officer, under whom they had landed, who was exacting, severe
in his judgment on the Patriots, and impatient of professional service.
Commodore Hood and his family also sailed for Halifax. Both Mackay and
Hood, aiming at reconciliation, and liberal in non-essentials, easily
won the general good-will. The disuse of the press-gang, which even
"Junius" was now justifying, and which England had not learned to
abominate, but which rowelled the differently trained mind of the
Colonies, was regarded as a great concession to personal liberty; and
the discontinuance of parades and horse-racing on Sundays was accepted
as a concession to a religious sentiment that was very general, and
which, so far from deserving the sneer of being hypocritical, indicated
the wide growth of respect for things noble and divine. These officers
seemed, at least, to