In fact, while the aristocracy of the Colony was thus confederating and consolidating discordant elements and plotting and breeding disaffection to the Mother Country, the unfranchised Mechanics and Working-men, residents of the City and toilers for their daily bread, with occasional exceptions, pursued their respective industrial vocations, peacefully and industriously, without taking any greater interest in the anxieties of their aristocratic neighbors than those " well-born " " Gentlemen in Trade " were taking in their welfare or in that of their respective families ; while the great body of those who occupied the rural Counties of the Colony, also hard-working and peacefully inclined, knew little of and cared less for what was then disturbing the previously wellsustained quiet of the metropolitan counting-rooms.

It is, indeed, true, in this connection, that the aristocratic Merchants and Ship-owners, in the City of New York, had been, during many years, more or less reasonably aggrieved by reason of the governmental interference with their well-established and very profitable "illicit trade," to which reference has been made: it is also true that, for the purpose of influencing and, if possible, of intimidating the Home Government, in their opposition to that Home Government, because of those assumed grievances, those high-toned lawbreakers had repeatedly resorted to the desperate means of, first, appealing to the maxims and the teachings of the fundamental law; of employing the former for their partisan slogan, and the latter for the foundations of their passionate appeals ; and, sometimes, second, of employing, directly or indirectly, the floating and the less respectable portions of the populationof the City, assupernu:nerarieson the stage on which they were acting their several parts in the drama of theirseemiug patriotism -- means which were iis unreal, in their hands, as their own patrotism," so