Bigoted, tireless, secretive, this cunning manipulator of
political passions followed many tortuous paths. His ability for
adroit misstatement of an adversary's position has been equaled
but once in our history. But to the casual reader of his four
volumes, Samuel Adams seems ever to be breathing the liberal air
of the town-meeting: everything is as plainly obvious as a good
citizen can make it. He has, too, the large utterance of the
European liberalism of his day. "Resolved," read his Resolutions
of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts in 1765, "that
there are certain essential rights of the British constitution of
government which are founded in the law of God and nature and are
the common rights of mankind." In his statement of the Rights of
the Colonists (1772) we are assured that "among the natural
rights of the colonists are these, First, a right to Life;
secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property .... All men have a
Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they please . . .
. When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary consent."
Jean-Jacques himself could not be more bland, nor at heart more
fiercely demagogic.

"Tom" Paine would have been no match for "Sam" Adams in a
town-meeting, but he was an even greater pamphleteer. He had
arrived from England in 1774, at the age of thirty-eight, having
hitherto failed in most of his endeavors for a livelihood.
"Rebellious Staymaker; unkempt," says Carlyle; but General
Charles Lee noted that there was "genius in his eyes," and he
bore a letter of introduction from Franklin commending him as an
"ingenious, worthy young man," which obtained for him a position
on the "Pennsylvania Magazine." Before he had been a year on
American soil, Paine was writing the most famous pamphlet of our