Boston at this period is usually described as a noted and opulent trading town,—­the Great Town,—­the Metropolis of New England,—­the best situated for commerce in North America,—­the largest city in the American British Empire.  It had the air of an English city.  Its commodious residences had spacious lawns and gardens and fields; while the contents of its stores, as seen in advertisements that sometimes cover a broadside of the journals, and the number of ship-yards that are shown by the maps to have girdled the town, betoken its business activity.  Its population of sixteen thousand, with its three thousand voters, and no pauper class, had carefully nurtured the common school, and was characterized not only by love of order, but by enterprise, intelligence, and public spirit.  It early welcomed the doctrine of a right in the people to interpret the religious law and to fashion, the political law, and thus practically welcomed freedom of thought and of utterance, and acknowledged allegiance only to truth.  It had tested for more than a century the working of this principle, as it was carried out in the congregation and in the municipality, in the Church and in the State.  By it each citizen was made deeply interested in the support of liberty; and thus the town had not only a public, but a public life, quietly nurtured as worthy citizens were successively called to manage the local affairs.  It furnished the instance of a community composed of men of small estates who very rarely had to use a mark for their name, and imbued by the spirit of individual independence toned into a respect for law, which, on the decline of feudalism, began to play a part on the national stage.  Thus the political character of Boston was sharply defined and firmly fixed.  It started in the republican way, went on for over a century in republican habits, and had the priceless heirloom of principles and traditions that were certainly life-giving, and may not inaptly be termed national.  The prediction was publicly uttered here, two centuries ago, and printed, that a day would come when “those that were branded before for Huguenots and Lollards and Hereticks, they should be thought the only men to be fit to have crowns upon their heads, and independent government committed to them”; and the crown that shone with superior lustre was progress in things that elevate and adorn humanity.

Such a government, so far as it regarded local affairs, the people substantially enjoyed under the protecting wing of a proud nationality.  They loved the old flag.  They claimed its history as their history, and its glory as their glory.  It gave security to their rights as men, as Christians, and as Englishmen.  It thus sheltered the precious body of civil and religious liberties which they were in the habit of speaking of as the rights of mankind.  For this they were attached to the English Constitution.  For this they said, “Dear England!” Their strong expressions in favor of the union with Great Britain