of religion," "men who
pray over what they do." With similar men, men who feared God and were
devoted to public liberty, Cromwell won at Marston Moor; and so striking
was the analogy, that at this hour it virtually forced itself on the
well-read Hutchinson: for men of this stamp had once made a revolution
in Boston, and as he looked out on this scene, perhaps scanned the
concourse who passed from Faneuil Hall to the Old South, and read in
their faces the sign of resolute hearts, he judged "their spirit to be
as high as was the spirit of their ancestors when they imprisoned
Andros, while they were four times as numerous." As the burden of
official responsibility pressed heavily on him, he realized that he had
to deal with an element far more potent than "the faction" which
officials had long represented as composing the Patriot band, and that
much depended on dealing with it wisely. This was not a dependent and
starved host wildly urging the terrible demand of "Bread or blood"; nor
was it fanaticism in a season of social discontent claiming
impossibilities at the hand of power: the craving was moral and
intellectual: it was an intelligent public opinion, a people with
well-grounded and settled convictions, making a just demand on arbitrary
power. Was such public opinion about to be scorned as though it were but
a faction, and by officials who bore high the party-standard? And were
men of such resoluteness of character and purpose about to be involved
in a work of carnage? or would the wielders of British authority avoid
the extremity by concession? Boston, indeed America, had seen no hour of
intenser interest, of deeper solemnity, of more instant peril, or of
truer moral sublimity; and as this assembly deliberated with the sounds
of the fife and drum in their ears, and with the soldiery in their
sight, questions like these must have been on every lip,--and they are
of the civil-war questions that cause an involuntary shudder in every
home.

The Old South was not large enough to hold the people, and they stood in
the street and near the Town-House awaiting the report of the committee
of fifteen, chosen in the morning. The Lieutenant-Governor was now at
the Council-Chamber, where, in addition to Colonels Dalrymple and Carr,
there had been summoned Captain Caldwell of the Rose frigate; and
Hutchinson would, he says, have summoned other crown officers, but he
knew the Council would not consent to it. He took care to repeat