It will, also, be remembered that, during a long period of years, one of those powerful families and its friends had occupied all or nearly all the high places in the Colonial Government, and had dispensed the extensive patronage of that Government and disposed of its valuable emoluments among those who were known to have been the friends and adherents of the family, agreeably to the dictates of its own controlling will ; while the other of those two antagonistic families and those who had been its friends and adherents, during the same long period, had uneasily and unsatisfactorily reposed on nothing else than on their own rural respectability, without any place in the Government of the Colony, without any of that influence which place had afforded so bounteously to its more powerful rival, and without any of those emoluments of oflice which, more than almost all else, would have been so exceedingly acceptable to every Scotchman and to every other within whose veins the controlling blood was Scotch. The feud between the De Lanceys and the Livingstons, in Colonial New York, is matter of history which is familiarly known to every New-Yorker who is reasonably acquainted with the history of his own country.

When the Home Government, eager to reduce the heavy land-tax to which the country gentlemen of England had been subjected by reason of the demands of that Government, in its vigorous prosecution of the War with France and Spain, first tightened the lines of those who administered the Customs, in the Colonies, and thereby seriously interfered with the smuggling in which every class of the local aristocracy was so largely and so profitably engaged, there was a common reason, which appealed to those of the De Lanceys and those of the Livingstons with equal force, for an opposition to the Home Government, in which those of both the families could harmoniously unite and from which both could be more surely benefitted ; and, in accordance with that teaching of common sense, that opposition to the Home Government, of which the reader has been told, was really established in the City of New York, with its organized Committee of