One might believe that in England "the general
inclination is to wish that we may preserve our liberties; and
perhaps even the ministry could for some reasons find it in their
hearts to be willing that we should be restored to the state we
were in before the passing of the Stamp Act." Even Lord
Hillsborough, richly meriting the "curses of the disinterested
and better part of the colonists," was by no means "to be
reckoned the most inveterate and active of all the Conspirators
against our rights. There are others on this side of the
Atlantick who have been more insidious in plotting the Ruin of
our Liberties than even he, and they are the more infamous,
because the country they would enslave, is that very Country in
which (to use the words of their Adulators and Expectants) they
were 'born and educated.'" Of all these restless adversaries and
infamous plotters of ruin, the chief, in the mind of Samuel
Adams, was probably Mr. Thomas Hutchinson.
Judged only by what he did and said and by such other sources of
information as are open to the historian, Thomas Hutchinson does
not appear to have been, prior to 1771, an Enemy of the Human
Race. One of his ancestors, Mistress Anne Hutchinson, poor woman,
had indeed been--it was as far back as 1637--an enemy of the
Boston Church; but as a family the Hutchinsons appear to have
kept themselves singularly free from notoriety or other grave
reproach.
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