or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice. Much less, I presume, will you be discouraged by any pretenses that malignants on this side the water will represent your paper as factious and seditious, or that the great on the other side the water will take offense at them. . . . I must and will repeat it, your paper deserves the patronage of every friend to his country. And whether the defamers of it are array«d in robes of scarlet or sable, whether they lurk and skulk in an insurance office, whether they assume the venerable character of a priest, the sly one of a scrivener, or the dirty, infamous, abandoned one of an informer, they are all the creatures and tools of the lust of domination."[1]
These are noble words indeed, and as we go on with our story, they will be worth recalling, when we come to realize that they were used by the same man who later on, when President of the United States, was the supporter of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the failure of which was necessary in order to put an end to the endeavor in this country to shackle the press.
Of all the patriots, it was Sam Adams whose head the British Government most desired. Edes and Gill, too, were openly threatened, as was Isaiah Thomas, the publisher of the Massachusetts Spy, referred to in a previous chapter. The decision to move on the stores at Lexington and to put an end to the military training was, to every patriot, the call to arms. At the same time that the Massachusetts Spy suspended and started moving its types and press to Worcester, Edes quietly moved an old press and one or two improved fonts of type to Watertown, and there the paper was printed until the evacuation of Boston by the British, when he returned
- ↑ Life and Works of John Adams, iii, 457, 438.
