enchant than had been the language already used
on the same subject, over and over again, in the discussions of the
preceding twelve months. It was that, in the recent change of the
political situation, the significance of that language had changed.
Prior to the time referred to, whatever had been said on the subject,
in any of the colonies, had been said for the purpose of dissuading
the government from passing the Stamp Act. But the government had now
passed the Stamp Act; and, accordingly, these resolutions must have
been meant for a very different purpose. They were a virtual
declaration of resistance to the Stamp Act; a declaration of
resistance made, not by an individual writer, nor by a newspaper, but
by the legislature of a great colony; and, moreover, they were the
very first declaration of resistance which was so made.[73]

This it is which gives us the contemporary key to their significance,
and to the vast excitement produced by them, and to the enormous
influence they had upon the trembling purposes of the colonists at
that precise moment. Hence it was, as a sagacious writer of that
period has told us, that merely upon the adoption of these resolves by
the committee of the whole, men recognized their momentous bearing,
and could not be restrained from giving publicity to them, without
waiting for their final adoption by the House. "A manuscript of the
unrevised resolves," says William Gordon, "soon reached Philadelphia,
having been sent off immediately upon their passing, that the earliest
information of what had been done might be obtained by the Sons of
Liberty.... At New York the resolves were handed about with great
privacy: they were accounted so treasonable, that the possessors of
them declined printing them in that city." But a copy of them having
been procured with much difficulty by an Irish gentleman resident in
Connecticut, "he carried them to New England, where they were
published and circulated far and wide in the newspapers, without any
reserve, and proved eventually the occasion of those disorders which
afterward broke out in the colonies.... The Virginia resolutions gave
a spring to all the disgusted; and they began to adopt different
measures."[74]

But while the tidings of these resolutions were thus moving toward New
England, and before they had arrived there, the assembly of the great
colony of Massachusetts had begun to take action. Indeed, it had first
met on the very day on which Pa