As we have said, also, the elaborate essays on the "Rights of Man and of Englishmen," on the " consent " which was necessary in order to give validity to Laws, and, generally, on the assjimed grievances to which the Colonists had been subjected, all of them the productions of well-paid Counsel or other interested writers, with which the newspapers of that period were filled to overflowing, were nothing else than means employed for the protection of that prolific, but corrupt, source of the wealth of the Merchants of the City of New York ; and the yells and the outrages, inflicted on both persons and properties, of those who had been employed to give ett'ect to those labored arguments of the press, by what were a^sumed to have been spontaneous outbursts of popular resentment against the usurpations of the Home Government -- usurpations of individual rights, by the way, which were only the same as those which were subsequently inflicted, in every State, on those who were not Freeholders; and which the Constitution for the United States has always inflicted and continues to inflict on the inhabitants of the several Territories, who have always been and who arc, now, taxed without having conticnted to any such taxation, their Delegates in the federal Congress having had no right, at any time, to vote on any question whatever

HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

abreast of the most advanced of the anarchists of that period ; and if, without a semblance of that "consent" of which so much had been said and written, as a prerequisite to any changeofgovernment-- without, also, any of those qualifications in itself and authorities from others, of which mention has been made -- the same handful of new-born revolutionists, at the same time, can be said to have really done so, the allegiance of the great body of the anti-revolutionary farmers of that County, and there were no others, to its Sovereign, was violated, if not abrogated, and all the obligations of that great body of the inhabitants of the County, to obey the legally established Governments and the legally enacted Laws of the Country, were dissolved, and all were made subject, instead, to that self-constituted County Committee which was then organized and taking its first step in Rebellion; to the proposed Congress of the Colony, in whom was to be vested absolute, unrestrained authority, in all classes of governmental affairs relating only to the Colony of New York ; and to the coming second Continental Congress, in whom, also, a similarly absolute, unrestrained authority, on every conceivable subject, within each and every of the several Colonies, would, also, be seated; and, therefore, every one of those peaceful and peacefully inclined farmers and every member of their respective families were, by that handful of revolutionists, insignificant in numbers and only tools in the hands of an unprincipled master mischief-maker, made subject, nobris volens, to every edict which should be promulgated by either of those three self-constituted, unrestrained, revolutionary bodies ; to whatever they or either of them should determine, no matter how monstrous its character might be ; and, very often, to whatever individual members of one or other of those bodies, intoxicated with the possession of a power to which, previously, they had been strangers and reveling in a despotism to which the Colony had not, at any period of its existence, been subjected, should demand and require.