The sixteenth article confirmed and continued in their offices all the civil magistrates and officers of every grade in the country, from the highest to the lowest, and provided for the election of their successors, under the existing Dutch laws, conditioned only that the new officers, .should take the oath of allegiance to their new English King. No such oath was wisely demanded ofthe old ones, and the administration of justice, not only in regard to lands, but in all its forms, went on precisely as if no change of government had taken place.

The twenty-first article confirmed to the City of New York, all the civil rights and powers it had under its former organization, and under the Assemblies which had been called, and in which it had been represented, during Stuyvesant's administration. Its lands were preserved to it, and all rights in relation thereto, by the same articles, which preserved the other lands of the province to their respective owners, as well as all the municipal rights, powers, and privileges the city possessed under the Dutch rule.

The Eighth article, in connexion with the twelfth, preserved, maintained, and continued, to the Established Dutch Cliurch all its rights, })rivileges, and immunities of creed and worship, and guaranteed to it freedom of conscience and church discipline, as well as the continuance of its regulations, as to its own concerns, and to the poor and to orphans, in the same hands, and under the same control, that they had ever been. But these articles did not continue it as the Established Church of the Province, or provide for its maintenance and control as such, by the government, or rather, through the government, as had been the case under the West India Company, and all the Charters of Freedoms and exemptions from the first to the last.