1 Doctor Sparlcs, in his Life of Gouvemeur Morris, i., 20, told lis of an " important cause in which that gentlemen was engaged," before the Courts, during the Colonial era -- " that of a contested Election, in West- " chester-county, where he had 5Ir. Jay for an opponent." We are not told who tlie contending parties, in that action, were ; but it is said, "it involved principles of evidence, questions about the right of "suffrage, as then exercised, and a complication of facts, local and gen- •*eral, which gave full scope for the display of legal knowledge and " forensic skill."

family and party and sect, united only in that one ojjposition to the Colonial policy of the Home Government^-- of "the Gentlemen in Trade," as they sometimes called themselves -- within the several Towns and Cities on the Atlantic seaboard, to some of the long-established Laws of the Kingdom, as well as to those which had been enacted, since the close of the War with France and Spain, for the purpose of meeting the necessities of the Mother Country, occasioned by the enormous expenses of tha* eventful contest -- the unfranchised Mechanics and Workingmen of that period, within the Cities and Towns referred to ' (sometimes, courted and caressed by those

2 It is proper for us to say that that opposition to the Colonial policy of the Home Government, as it was developed within the City of Xew York, overpowered every difference of family or of sect or of party which had been previously known ; and that the De Lanceys and the Livingstons, the Churchman and the Dissenter, the Jacobin ami the Georgian, for the purposes of that opposition and of whatever might be necessary to establish its power, became as one man -- one in purpose, one in determination, one in action, one in everything.