V 
THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BOSTON 
TEA PARTY. 
Ir may be’ one of the symptoms of a wholesome re- 
action against the vapid Fourth of July rhetoric of the 
past generation that writers of our own day sometimes 
betray a tendency to belittle the events of the Revolu- 
tionary period. The smoke of that conflict is so far 
cleared away as to enable us to see that sometimes the 
popular leaders did things that were clearly wrong ; 
we find, too, that all the Tories were not quite so black 
as they have been painted; and from such discoveries 
a reaction of feeling more or less extensive naturally 
arises. In the case of many scholars born and bred in 
the neighbourhood of Boston such a reaction has within 
the last few years been especially strong and marked. 
The immediate cause has doubtless been the publica- 
tion of the Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson, 
the last royal governor of Massachusetts. 
In such waves of feeling there is apt to be a lack of 
discrimination ; bad things get praised along with the 
good, and good things get blamed along with the bad. 
An instance is furnished by an essay on “ Boston 
Mobs before the Revolution,” by the late Andrew 
Preston Peabody, published in the Adlantec Monthly, 
September, 1888. This interesting paper was called 
forth by the act of the Massachusetts legislature in 
voting a civic monument to Crispus Attucks and the 
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