"is cultivating the sensations of freedom." For a decade these
excitable Americans did, indeed, cultivate the sensations of freedom;
went out periodically, as it were, to "snuff the approach of tyranny on
every tainted breeze"; a practice which, becoming habitual, developed a
peculiar type of mind which marked a man out from his fellows. Such a
man was William Hall, Esquire, of North Carolina, at whose house Josiah
Quincy stopped; "a most sensible, polite gentleman, and, although a
Crown officer, a man replete with the sentiments of general liberty."
How useless, indeed, were arguments drawn from positive law, or the
citation of many legal precedents, to convince men _replete with
sentiments of general liberty!_

And those who so assiduously cultivated the sensations of freedom could
not easily deny themselves the martyr's crown. Like the Girondins in
France at a later day, many American patriots, such as Josiah Quincy
himself and Richard Henry Lee, have somewhat the air of loving liberty
because they had read the classics. They liked to think of themselves as
exhibiting "a resolution which would not have disgraced the Romans in
their best days"; and seem almost to welcome persecution in order to
prove that the spirit of Regulus still lived. It was no mere dispute in
the practical art of politics that engaged them, but a cosmic conflict
between the unconditioned good and the powers of darkness. "It is
impossible that vice can so triumph over virtue," writes Lee in all
soberness, "as that the slaves of Tyranny should succeed against the
brave and generous asserters of Liberty and the just rights of
Humanity." Even the common people, said Joseph Warren, "take an honest
pride in being singled out by a tyrannous administration." Knowing that
"their merits, not their crimes, make them the objects of Ministerial
vengeance," they refused to pay a penny tax with the religious fervor of
men doing battle for the welfare of the human race. Consider the dry
common sense with which Dr. Johnson disposed of the alleged Tyranny of
Great Britain: "But I say, if the rascals are so prosperous, oppression
has agreed with them, or there has been no oppression"; and contrast it
with the reverent spirit which pervades the writings of John Dickinson
or the formal protests of the Continental Congress. Reconciliation was
indeed difficult between men who could treat the matter lightly, in the
manner of Soame Jenyns, and men who, with John Adams, t