with the tinsel which was not what it seemed to be, was secretly perfecting the juggle which was intended to deceive all others than those who were participants in the performance and sharers in the profits to be derived from it, -- neither consistency nor propriety nor integrity was regarded or even thought of, the cupidity of the end entirely justified the unrighteousness of the means ; and new governing powers and new rules of conduct and new methods took their places in every Town, throughout the County; and old obligations were disregarded, and old guaranties were abrogated, and the safety of persons and of properties rested on other foundations than those which were known to and depended on by those of an earlier period.

The American Revolution had finished its work and was ended : the long-established Government of Law had been crowded aside and, in fact if not entirely in form, had given place to a new Government of arbitrary, unbridled Force : thenceforth, the peace of the County and the rights of Individuals and of Property, within the County, sacredly respected even under a Monarchy, were held only by those who possessed them, subject to the unrestrained will of the stronger.

The careful reader will not have failed to see, in what has been written in this narrative and in the testimony which has been adduced to sustain it, the stern fact that, as far as the Colony of New York was concerned, and we write of no other Colony, the opposition to the measures of the Home Goverment, from 17(i3 until the Spring of 1775, which, subsequently, became more widely known as The American Revolution, was not, in the slightest degree, the outcome of a popular movement, in which the great body of the Colonists or any considerable portion of it arose in opposition to a wrong, inflicted or sought to be inflicted by the Parliament of Great Britain or by any other body, on the Colony or on any individual member of it, as has been rhetorically pretended, by orators and poets and historians, from that day until the present ; but, on the contrary, that it originated in the City of New York, among those of the commercial and mercantile classes, relatively few in number, whom, by reason of their greater wealth or of their higher social standing, we may properly regard, as they were regarded by themselves, as the aristocracy of the Colony -- with few, if any exceptions, they were those wealthy and enterprising Merchants, of various names and families and j^arties and sects and nationalities, each of whom had sunk, for all the purposes of that particular movement, whatever of individual or family or partisan or sectarian or national animosity, against others, he possessed, combined and acting in a common opposition to all those measures of the Home Government which had tended to break down the unblushing lawlessness of those confederated Merchants, in their entire disregard of the Navigation and Revenue Laws of the