Colonists, in New York, including every class, and sect, and political party -- and it possessed no authority to represent any other, and made no pretension to do so -- than either the Congress of the Continent or the fragmentary revolutionary faction within the Colony had done or possibly could do; and there is very great reason for the belief that its orderly, and dignified, and more practically sensible influence would have been recognized beyond the limits of New York, and that it would have succeeded in its honorable efforts and evidently earnest purposes to restore, permanently and without dishonor, that harmony between the Colonies and the IMother Country which all professed to desire, had not the rashness of General Gage, in Massachusetts, during the brief recess which it had voted to itself, broken the well-strained barriers of Peace, loosed the worst elements of human nature in the Colonists, overturned everything which pertained to a Government of Law, and plunged the Continent into all the horrors of a needless and, necessarily, a bitter fratricidal War -- a War which, at its conclusion, the farmers of Westchester-county, or those of them who remained, more than all New England combined, had sorrowful reasons for remembering, because of the devastated homesteads, the divided families, the antagonistic neighbors, and the remembrance of plunder, and outrages, and butcheries, among them, of which that War had been so abundantly and so sadly productive.

A few words only are required to complete the record of the results of that much-slandered General Assembly; and the space which they will occupy cannot be better occupied.