The most convenient way for the people would be to pass into King Street, up by the Council-Chamber, and along what is now Washington Street, to the church.  As they went, no mention is made of mottoes or banners or flags, of cheers or of jeers.  Thomas dishing said his countrymen “were like the old British commoners, grave and sad men”; and it was said in the Council to Hutchinson, “That multitude are not such as pulled down your house”; but they are “men of the best characters,” “men of estates and men of religion,” “men who pray over what they do.”  With similar men, men who feared God and were devoted to public liberty, Cromwell won at Marston Moor; and so striking was the analogy, that at this hour it virtually forced itself on the well-read Hutchinson:  for men of this stamp had once made a revolution in Boston, and as he looked out on this scene, perhaps scanned the concourse who passed from Faneuil Hall to the Old South, and read in their faces the sign of resolute hearts, he judged “their spirit to be as high as was the spirit of their ancestors when they imprisoned Andros, while they were four times as numerous.”  As the burden of official responsibility pressed heavily on him, he realized that he had to deal with an element far more potent than “the faction” which officials had long represented as composing the Patriot band, and that much depended on dealing with it wisely.  This was not a dependent and starved host wildly urging the terrible demand of “Bread or blood”; nor was it fanaticism in a season of social discontent claiming impossibilities at the hand of power:  the craving was moral and intellectual:  it was an intelligent public opinion, a people with well-grounded and settled convictions, making a just demand on arbitrary power.  Was such public opinion about to be scorned as though it were but a faction, and by officials who bore high the party-standard?  And were men of such resoluteness of character and purpose about to be involved in a work of carnage? or would the wielders of British authority avoid the extremity by concession?  Boston, indeed America, had seen no hour of intenser interest, of deeper solemnity, of more instant peril, or of truer moral sublimity; and as this assembly deliberated with the sounds of the fife and drum in their ears, and with the soldiery in their sight, questions like these must have been on every lip,—­and they are of the civil-war questions that cause an involuntary shudder in every home.

The Old South was not large enough to hold the people, and they stood in the street and near the Town-House awaiting the report of the committee of fifteen, chosen in the morning.  The Lieutenant-Governor was now at the Council-Chamber, where, in addition to Colonels Dalrymple and Carr, there had been summoned Captain Caldwell of the Rose frigate; and Hutchinson would, he says, have summoned other crown officers, but he knew the Council would not consent to it.  He took care to repeat to the committee, he says, the declaration