The Congress of the Colonies, as the reader will remember and as we have stated, was one of those means which were resorted to, by the aristocratic, anti-revolutionary commercial and mercantile classes, within the City of New York and by those Traders whose seat was at Albany, for the purpose, it was alleged, of securing a peaceful redress of what those ilerchants and Traders were pleased to consider as grievances -- in other words, for the removal of those restraints on that illicit trade " in which they had been so long, so corruptly, and so successfully engaged, which the Home Government had recently interposed, with more than usual efficiency ; and for the exoneration of that lawlessness and reckless destruction of property, by mobs who had been in-

HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

spired and directed by controlling members of those commercial and mercantile classes,for which property the local authorities had neglected or declined to compensate the owners -- and, besides the inditt'erence of the farmers, who constituted a vastly great majority of the adult males who were permanent residents of the Colony, which we have described, it encountered, from its inception, the earnest and active and unscrupulous handful of " fire-eaters," within the City of New York, because of the moderate temper in which it had been proposed ; because of the disregard of the pretensions of the Town of Boston, with which they were in harmonious correspondence ; and because the authors and promoters of the project of convening such a Congress had disregarded the aspirations of some of those "fire-eaters" for places in the Delegation who would be sent to that Congress, as representatives of the Colony of New York; and, reasonably enough, it encountered, also, the opposition, direct and decided, of that very small number who personally constituted the Colonial Government, and by some of those who occupied places of honor and emolument under its authority, and, most zealously of all these, by those hungry sycophants of authority -- hangers on of that Colonial Government who never failed to "sneeze, whenever it took snuff" -- the aggregate of whom was powerless in its legitimate opi)osition because of the sniallness of its numbers.