While these things had been going on here, the die as to Massachusetts and Boston had been cast in the British cabinet, by the conclusion to place a military force at the command of the Governor.  This decision was reached before the June meeting or the June riot; and it is quite in vain to seek the real reason for it in what appears on paper about the processions on the eighteenth of March or the equally insignificant prior manifestations.  Hutchinson and Gage and other Loyalists admitted that all these were trifles.  The Ministers were no strangers to mobs; even if there had been as violent ones in Boston as there were in London, they could not have acted upon them as proofs of disloyalty.  Besides the calumnies that made out the popular leaders to be anarchists, that perverted love of the local government into a desire for independence, there was one that touched the pride of the mother-country; for the Loyalists said of the Bostonians,—­(there is nothing like the language of the time to embody the spirit of the time,)—­that “every dirty fellow, just risen from his kennel, congratulated his neighbor on their glorious victory over England; and they were so intoxicated with their own vast importance, that the lowest wretch among them conceived himself superior to the first English merchant.”  This was falsehood; for it is certain that the joy for the repeal of the Stamp Act was joy for harmony restored between the Colonies and Great Britain.

Thus, owing to such representations, while the people of Boston were deliberating in the great town-meetings of June, orders were on their way to General Gage, whose head-quarters were in New York, to place troops in Castle William, to station a detachment in Boston, and to keep a naval force in the harbor.  The despatch of Lord Hillsborough, addressed to Governor Bernard, communicating this conclusion, was elaborate and able, and laid down in full the policy of the Government.  The instructions were based on the pretence that Boston was “in possession of a licentious and unrestrained mob”; that it was animated by a disposition “to resist the laws and to deny the authority of Parliament”; and that the alleged “illegal and unwarrantable measures which had been pursued in opposing the officers of the revenue in the execution of their duty, and for intimidating the civil magistrates, showed the necessity of strengthening the hands of the Government.”  This despatch refers to five of Bernard’s letters as containing such representations.  It is worthy of remark, that Lord Hillsborough sharply rebuked the Governor for having all along asked the advice of the Council as to the introduction of the troops; for to admit such a function in the Council, he said, was to concede a power inconsistent with the Constitution.  “It is you,” are the official words, “to whom the Crown has delegated its authority, and you alone are responsible for the best use of it.”