"modestly inquired of him whether his finances were not rather low than
otherwise, he replied it was true that was the case, but HE WAS VERY
INDIFFERENT ABOUT THESE MATTERS, SO THAT HIS POOR ABILITIES WERE OF ANY
SERVICE TO THE PUBLIC; upon which the gentleman obliged him to accept
a purse containing about fifteen or twenty Johannes." To accept so much
and still preserve one's self-respect would be impossible to ordinary
men under ordinary circumstances. Fate had so ordered the affairs
of Samuel Adams that integrity of character required him to be an
extraordinary man acting under extraordinary circumstances.

The character of his mind, as well as the outward circumstances of
his life, predisposed Samuel Adams to think that a great crisis in the
history of America and of the world confronted the men of Boston. There
was in him some innate scholastic quality, some strain of doctrinaire
Puritan inheritance diverted to secular interests, that gave direction
to all his thinking. In 1743, upon receiving the degree of Master of
Arts from Harvard College, he argued the thesis, "Whether it be lawful
to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the Commonwealth cannot otherwise
be preserved." We may suppose that the young man acquitted himself
well, reasoning with great nicety in favor of the legality of an illegal
action, doubtless to the edification of Governor Shirley, who was
present and who perhaps felt sufficiently remote from the performance,
being himself only an actual supreme magistrate presiding over a real
commonwealth. And indeed for most young men a college thesis is but an
exercise for sharpening the wits, rarely dangerous in its later
effects. But in the case of Samuel Adams, the ability to distinguish
the speculative from the actual reality seemed to diminish as the years
passed. After 1764, relieved of the pressure of life's anxieties
and daily nourishing his mind on premises and conclusions reasonably
abstracted from the relative and the conditioned circumstance, he
acquired in a high degree the faculty of identifying reality with
propositions about it; so that, for example, Liberty seemed threatened
if improperly defined, and a false inference from an axiom of politics
appeared the same as evil intent to take away a people's rights. Thus it
was that from an early date, in respect to the controversy between
the colonies and the mother country, Samuel Adams became possessed of
settled convictions that were capable of