clear and concise presentation
and that were at once impersonal and highly subjective, for which
outward events--the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the appointment
of Thomas Hutchinson as Governor, or whatever--furnished as it were the
suggestion only, the convictions themselves being largely the result of
inward brooding, the finespun product of his own ratiocinative mind.

The crisis which thus threatened--in the mind of Samuel Adams--was not
an ordinary one: no mere complication of affairs, or creaking of wornout
institutions, or honest difference of opinion about the expediency or
the legality of measures. It was a crisis engendered deliberately by
men of evil purpose, public enemies well known and often named. Samuel
Adams, who had perhaps not heard of even one of the many materialistic
interpretations of history, thought of the past as chiefly instructive
in connection with certain great epochal conflicts between Liberty and
Tyranny--a political Manicheanism, in which the principle of Liberty was
embodied in the virtuous many and the principle of Tyranny in the wicked
few. Those who read history must know it for a notorious fact that
ancient peoples had lost their liberties at the hands of designing men,
leagued and self-conscious conspirators against the welfare of the human
race. Thus the yoke was fastened upon the Romans, "millions... enslaved
by a few." Now, in the year 1771, another of these epochal conflicts was
come upon the world, and Samuel Adams, living in heroic days, was
bound to stand in the forefront of the virtuous against "restless
Adversaries... forming the most dangerous Plans for the Ruin of the
Reputation of the People, in order to build their own Greatness upon the
Destruction of their liberties."

A superficial observer might easily fall into the error of supposing
that the restless adversaries and designing conspirators against whom
patriots had to contend were all in England; on the contrary, the most
persistent enemies of Liberty were Americans residing in the midst
of the people whom they sought to despoil. One might believe that in
England "the general inclination is to wish that we may preserve our
liberties; and perhaps even the ministry could for some reasons find it
in their hearts to be willing that we should be restored to the state
we were in before the passing of the Stamp Act." Even Lord Hillsborough,
richly meriting the "curses of the disinterested and better part of
the col