“The colonists of America are not like any other people,” said he.  “Their fathers came to this land when it was a savage wilderness, tearing themselves from their homes, from civil surroundings; that they might be far from tyranny, in small forms as well as great.  Not merely tyranny of king or church, but the shapes of it that Hamlet speaks of—­’the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the insolence of office.’  All for the sake of liberty, they battled with savages and with nature, fought and toiled, bled and starved.  And Tyranny ignored them till they had transformed their land and themselves into something worth its attention.  And then, backed and sustained by royal authority, those hated things stole in upon them—­’the insolence of office, the proud man’s contumely, the oppressor’s wrong.’  This, lookye, besides the particular matter of taxation without representation; of being bid to obey laws they have no hand in making; of having a set of masters, three thousand miles away, and not one of their own land or their own choosing, order them to do thus and so:—­why, ’twere the very soul and essence of slavery to submit!  Man, how can you wonder I am of their side?”

“And with your taste for the things to be found only in the monarchies of Europe; for the arts, and the monuments of past history, the places hallowed by great events and great men!” said I, quoting remembered expressions of his own.

“Why,” says he, smiling a little regretfully, “we shall have our own arts and hallowed places some day; meanwhile one’s taste must defer to one’s heart and one’s intelligence.”

“Yes,” said I, with malicious derision, “when ’tis so great a question as a paltry tax upon tea.”

“’Tis no such thing,” says he, warming up; “’tis a question of being taxed one iota, the thousandth part of a farthing, by a body of strangers, a body in which we are not represented.”

“Neither were we represented in it when it sent armies to protect us from the French, and toward the cost of which ’tis right we should pay.”

“We paid, in men and money both.  And the armies were sent less for our protection than for the aggrandisement of England.  She was fighting the French the world over; in America, as elsewhere, the only difference being that in America we helped her.”

So ’twas disputed between many another pair of friends, between brothers, between fathers and sons, husbands and wives.  I do not know of another civil war that made as many breaks in families.  Meanwhile, the local authorities—­those of local election, not of royal appointment—­were yet outwardly noncommittal.  When Colonel Washington, the general-in-chief appointed by the congress of the colonies at Philadelphia, was to pass through New York on his way to Cambridge, where the New England rebels were surrounding the king’s troops in Boston, it was known that Governor Tryon would arrive from England about the same time.  Our authorities,