had employed for the intimidation of the Home Government and by their own persistent selfishness, gradually produced a new and powerful political element, adverse to their own pretensions to exclusiveness, to which they had been, previously, strangers. Their want of abilities, as navigators on the troubled waters of Colonial politics, was painfully evident to all others than to themselves ; and the adverse power of the new-formed political element was haughtily disregarded, until it had become so well established that it was enabled not only to assert but to maintain its standing.

The character and influence of that new factor iu Colonial politics, during the revolutionary era, require a few words concerning its origin, beyond what we have already said of it.

The outlay of wealth can generally secure ingenious advocates for any cause, no matter how unsavory it may be ; and, in that of the confederated aristocratic Smugglers of the City of New York, of which mention has been made, well-paid Counsel and ready writers for the newspapers, in their eagerness to support their wealthy and liberal connections and clients, in their systematic violation of the written Law of the land and in their determined struggle to retain the " illicit trade " in which they were so profitably engaged, in the absence of better authorities for the support of their impassioned rhetoric, were obliged to resort to the fundamental and ill-defined theories of political science, with which, through long-continued iteration, the entire body of the inhabitants, the unfranchised as well as the Iranchised, had already become well acquainted ; and, iu iheir purposes to oppose the Home Government and to shelter their opulent employers, those who were thus employed, speakers and writers, loudly spoke and glibly wrote of " the natural Rights of Man " and of " the Rights "of Englishmen," of " Magna Charta," and of " repre- "sentation," and of "consent," without the slightest qualification, as if every man and every Colonist were intended to be included in those general and unqualified terms; as if every man throughout the Colony were intended to be considered the equal of every other man, therein and elsewhere ; as if every Colonist of every sect and party and in every condition of life were entitled, of right, to be recognized and received and entertained, as an equal, socially and politically and in every other relation, by every other Colonist, of high or of low degree -- and, without any qualification, those popular catchwords with which the City had echoed, year after year, meant all these, if they meant anything -- all of which, however, in the spirit in which they had been uttei'ed, were audacious fictions, spoken or written in the interest of those who had resorted to them, only for deceitful and illegal and immoral jnirposes, as would have been quickly seen had ''the poor reptiles" who had constituted that lowly mass of unfranchised Workingmen, directly and unreservedly, at any time, during