194 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 
the like of which, I dare say, were never recorded in 
the history of riots. So punctilious were those Ind- 
ians that when one of them by accident broke a pad- 
lock belonging to one of the ship’s officers, he bought 
a new padlock the next morning and made good the 
loss. 
Who were these Indians? Admiral Montagu and 
other British gentlemen, who with him beheld the pro- 
ceedings, saw fit to declare that they “ were not a dis- 
orderly rabble, but men of sense, coolness, and 
intrepidity.” Paul Revere was among them, and, in 
all probability, Dr. Warren was one. George Robert 
Twelves Hawes, one of the last survivors, died in 
1835, at the age of ninety-eight. He used to tell how, 
while he was busily ripping open a chest, the man 
next to him raised his hatchet so high that the Indian 
blanket fell away from his arm and disclosed the well- 
known crimson velvet sleeve and point-lace ruffles of 
John Hancock! 
Can anybody really discover in these proceedings 
anything that justifies a comparison with the furious 
pro-slavery mob that threatened Garrison’s life? The 
writer who made that strange comparison seems to 
have been thinking of the fact that, in both cases, 
well-dressed persons were concerned. I suppose 
Hancock’s velvet sleeve may be responsible for the 
droll analogy. It seems to me eminently fitting that 
the hand which subscribed so handsomely the Decla- 
ration of Independence should have taken part in the 
decisive defiance that brought on the war. We are 
told that the destruction of the tea was “illegal”; so 
was the Declaration of Independence. Each rested 
upon the paramount right of self-preservation, and the 
