y preserved by the actors in this daring exploit,
respecting their connection with it, has rendered this part of the task
one of no little difficulty. Their secret was remarkably well kept; and
but for the family traditions which survive, we should know very little
of the men who composed the famous Boston tea party.

Nevertheless, the attempt to gather up the scattered fragments of
personal reminiscence and biography, in order to give a little more
completeness to this interesting chapter of our revolutionary history,
is here made. The fortunate recovery, by the publisher of this volume,
of the letters of the American consignees to the East India Company,
and other papers shedding light upon the transaction, affords material
aid in the accomplishment of our purpose.

* * * * *

When King Charles II. had finished that first cup of tea ever brewed in
England,--the gift of the newly-created East India Company,--no sibyl
was at hand to peer into the monarch's cup and foretell from its dregs,
the dire disaster to his realm, hidden among those insignificant
particles. Could a vision of those battered tea chests, floating in
Boston harbor, with _tu doces_, in the legible handwriting of history,
inscribed upon them, have been disclosed to him, even that careless,
pleasure-loving prince would have been sobered by the lesson. It was
left for his successor, George III., who failed to read the handwriting
on the wall,--visible to all but the willfully blind,--to realize its
meaning in the dismemberment of an empire.

* * * * *

A survey of the progress of the revolution up to the beginning of the
year 1773, will help us to understand the political situation. Ten years
of constant agitation had educated the people of the colonies to a clear
perception of their rights, and also to a knowledge that it was the
fixed purpose of the home government to deprive them of the one they
most valued, namely, that of being taxed with their own consent, through
their local assemblies, as had always been the custom, and not at the
arbitrary will of the British parliament--a body in which they were not
and could not be represented--three thousand miles away. The strange
thing about this is, that the people of Great Britain should not have
seen in the light of their own past history--what they have since seen
clearly enough--that the Americans were only contending for principles
for