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

THE AMERICAN RKVOLl'TION, 1774-1783.

Fifty-one and its more noted Continental Congress among the results of that union.

At the time of whieh we write, the threatened danger from t he working classes ai»i)eared to have heen averted ; the Committee of Fifty-one, or those who had remained in it after the treachery of those who had used It for a ste])|)ing-st<)ne to something of greater inriuenee, had slowly retired from the field of political action antl had been dissolved by its own action; the l\)nlinental Congress and its policy and its methods had been accepted by the Livingstons and their friends and adherents as that whicli seemed to be best adapted to add strength to their hereditary a.ntagonism to the De Lanceys and their friends and adherents; the Ceneral Assend)iy of the Colony and its policy and its methods, not less in opi)()sili()n to the (\)lonial i)oliev of the Home Government than the others, had been acee})ted by the De Lanceys and their friends and adherents, as well us by the great body of the Colonists, throughout the entire Colony, as the only legitimate e.xponent of the will of the Colony and the only one which could reasonably be expected to obtain a hearing before the Home Government and the I'arliament and the people of Great Britain, from whom, only, a redress of the grievances of the Colony could be obtained ; and the Colony was again made the witness and the victim of a bitter feud between rival families, one of them holding and the other endeavoring to obtain all the ])]accs and influence and emoluments of the Colonial Government.