hey seek
matter for protests, remonstrances, they are puzzled where to charge
the grievances which they look for." The new Governor looked forward to
happier days and an easy administration. "Hancock and most of the party
are quiet," he said, "and all of them, except Adams, abate of their
virulence. Adams would push the Continent into a rebellion tomorrow, if
it was in his power."

No one, in the year 1770, was better fitted than Samuel Adams, either by
talent and temperament or the circumstances of his position, to push the
continent into a rebellion. Unlike most of his patriot friends, he had
neither private business nor private profession to fall back upon when
public affairs grew tame, his only business being, as one might say,
the public business, his only profession the definition and defense of
popular rights. In this profession, by dint of single-minded devotion
to it through a course of years, he had indeed become wonderfully expert
and had already achieved for himself the enviable position of known and
named leader in every movement of opposition to royal or magisterial
prerogative. In this connection no exploit had brought him so much
distinction as his skillful management of the popular uprising which had
recently forced Governor Hutchinson to withdraw the troops from Boston.
The event was no by-play in the life of Samuel Adams, no amateur
achievement accomplished on the side, but the serious business of a man
who during ten years had abandoned all private pursuits and had embraced
poverty to become a tribune of the people.

Samuel Adams had not inherited poverty nor had he, after all, exactly
embraced it, but had as it were naturally drifted into it through
indifference to worldly gain, the indifference which men of single and
fixed purpose have for all irrelevant matters. The elder Samuel Adams
was a merchant of substance and of such consequence in the town of
Boston that in Harvard College, where students were named according to
the prominence of their families, his son's name was fifth in a class
of twenty-two. In 1748, upon the death of his father, Samuel Junior
accordingly inherited a very decent property, considered so at least
in that day--a spacious old house in Purchase Street together with a
well-established malt business. For business, however, the young man,
and not so young either, was without any aptitude whatever, being
entirely devoid of the acquisitive instinct and neither possessing nor