It would be a tedious and profitless task to go over the bickerings and quarrels that occurred between the inhabitants and the soldiers.  The high-spirited citizens, on being challenged in their walks, could not keep their temper; the roughs, here as in every place, would have their say; and the coarse British soldier could not be restrained by discipline; yet in all the brawls, for seventeen months, not a gun was fired in an affray.  Fist had been met with fist, and club with club; and not unfrequently these quarrels were settled in the courts.  The nature of such emergency as would justify the troops in firing on the people was acutely discussed in the newspapers, and undoubtedly the subject was talked about in private circles and in the political clubs.  “What shall I say?” runs an article in the “Gazette.”  “I shudder at the thought.  Surely no provincial magistrate could be found so steeled against the sensations of humanity and justice as wantonly to order troops to fire on an unarmed populace, and more than repeat in Boston the tragic scene exhibited in St. George’s Fields.”  It was a wanton fire on an unarmed populace that was protected against; and the protest was by men who involuntarily shrank from mob-law as they would from the hell of anarchy.  They apprehended an impromptu collision between the people and the troops; they knew that an illegal and wanton fire on the people would produce such collision; the danger of this result formed, undoubtedly, a large portion of the common talk; and the frequency and manner in which the subject was discussed elicited from General Gage the rather sweeping remark, that every citizen in Boston was a lawyer.  Every citizen was interested in the support of public liberty and public order, and might well regard with deep concern the threats that were continually made, which, if executed, would disturb both.  Hutchinson, in one of his letters, thus states the conclusions that were reached:—­“Our heroes for liberty say that no troops dare to fire on the people without the order of the civil magistrate, and that no civil magistrate, would dare to give such orders.  In the first part of their opinion they may be right; in the second they cannot be sure until they have made the trial.”

On Friday, the second of March, in the forenoon, as three soldiers were at Gray’s Ropewalks, near the head of India Wharf, they were asked by one of the workmen to empty a vault.  Sharp altercation followed this insult, and the soldiers went off, but soon returned with a party of their comrades, when there was a challenge to a boxing-match, and this grew into a fight, the rope-makers using their “wouldring-sticks,” and the soldiers clubs and cutlasses.  It proved to be the most serious quarrel that had occurred.  Lieutenant-Colonel Carr, commander of the Twenty-Ninth, which, Hutchinson said, was composed of such bad fellows that discipline could not restrain them, made a complaint to the Lieutenant-Governor relative to the provoking conduct of the rope-maker which brought on the affray; and thus this affair became the occasion of political consultation, which tended to intensify the animosity between the parties.