an merchants who advised this step had fatally misjudged
the situation. The approach of the tea-ships was the signal for instant
and general opposition. Smugglers opposed the East India Company venture
because it threatened to destroy the very lucrative Holland trade; the
fair trader because it conferred a monopoly upon an English corporation,
but above all because, if the Company could sell its tea, the
non-importation agreement, that favorite conservative method of
obtaining redress, at once effective and legal, would have proved after
all a useless measure. Unless they were ready for decisive action, the
long struggle against Parliamentary taxation must end in submission.
Many conservatives were content to try non-consumption agreements; but
it was a foregone conclusion that if the tea was once landed, it would
be sold, and a great majority were in favor of destroying it or sending
it back to England. The latter method was employed in New York and
Philadelphia; but in Boston Governor Hutchinson refused to issue return
clearance papers until the cargoes were discharged. There the radicals,
with the moral support of the great body of conservative citizens,
carried the day. On December 16, 1773, undisturbed by the English ships
of war, men disguised as Mohawks, "no ordinary Mohawks, you may depend
upon it," boarded the East India Company's vessels and emptied its tea
into Boston Harbor.

Neither the Government nor the people of England were now in any mood
for further concessions. The average Briton had given little thought to
America since the repeal of the Stamp Act. He easily recalled that three
years before the ministers had good-naturedly withdrawn the major part
of the Townshend duties, and since then had rested in the confident
belief that the quarrel was happily ended. The destruction of the tea
seemed to him a gratuitous insult, for it passed his understanding that
the Americans should resent a measure which enabled them to buy their
tea cheaper than he could himself; and he was, therefore, ready to back
the Government in any measures it might take for asserting the authority
of Parliament over these excitable colonists whose whims had too long
been seriously regarded. This task the Government, now for the first
time effectively controlled by the king, was quite willing to undertake,
all the more so on account of the recent burning of the Gaspee and the
dishonorable publication of Hutchinson's letters. By overwh