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 effect to those labored arguments of the press, by what were assumed 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 are, now, taxed without having consented to any such taxation, their Delegates in the federal Congress having had no right, at any time, to vote on any question whatever

2G2

HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

-- were no more than additional instrumentalities in the hands of wealthy and unprincipled lawbreakers, Snuigglers, employed for the purpose of sheltering those aristocratic culprits from the penalties which the Revenue-laws had imposed on them and, if possible, of enabling them to continue, with impunity, those flagrant violations of morality and of Law which men of less wealth and influence could not have committed without having been exposed to fine and imprisonment and confiscation of property.