" That the Colonies, respectively, are entitled to a "free and exclusive power of legislation, within " themselves, respectively, in all cases of internal "polity, whatsoever, subject only to the negative of " their Sovereign, in such manner as has been, hercr " tofore, accustomed.

"Resolved: That no one Article of the afore- " going Report be considered preliminary to another, ■' so as to preclude an accommodation without such "Article; and that no part of the said Report be

HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

"deemeti binding or obligatory upon the Rejire- " sentativea of this Colouy, in Continental Congress." >

The principles on which that Plan was constructed and the methods which were proposed for the execution of its provisions were so radically subversive of all the purposes for which Colonies were established and protected ; so .singularly presumptuous in claiming all the privileges and benefits enjoyed by Englishmen without assuming any of the burdens under which Englishmen were then staggering; so unaccountably inconsistent in conceding the atithority of the Parliament to regulate their Trade and to levy Duties on their Imports while, at the same time, they denied the authority of that Parliament to impose Taxes on them, for general purposes, in the same manner and to the same extent and for the same purposes that it imposed similar Taxes on Englishmen, in England ; so unduly arrogaut iu dictating to the Home Government and to the Parliament what they should do and what they should not do -- including, in the former, a removal of all those obstructions to the " illicit Trade" of the Colonists, which that Home Government and that Parliament had interposed -- as the price of their indirect proffer of an abandonment of their rebellious movements and of their return to their duties, as snbjects of the Crown, that it is difficult to bring one's self to a belief that the framers and supporters of that proposed Plan were really sincere in proposing it. unles.s with the qualification that their enthusiasm and the seeming indifference of the Home and Colonial Governments had blinded them to its remarkable peculiarities, and induced them to regard the Colonists as something superior, in their political standing, to other subjects of the Crown -- as something more than subjects, owing obedience to those in authority and to the Laws of the land.