they possessed a conceded interest; that no appeal from the judgment of such a local revolutionary tribunal, too often controlled by personal or family quarrels* or by ecclesiastical or neighborhood feuds or by foreign interferences, was provided for or allowed ; and that the dictates of his conscience and the oath of his office, if he held an office, as far as these sh(,uld assert his duty to his Sovereign and to the Colonial and Home Governments, must be sternly disregarded and suppressed, by every one.

History has failed to record, in the annals of any other community, another such instance of solemn mockery and of refined hypocrisy and of relentless personal and partisan bitterness as is seen in this enactment, framed and ordained and promulgated by men who pretended to so much of honor and intelligence, to so much of loyalty to the King and of regard for the Constitution, to so much of veneration for the Rights of Man and of reverence for the supreme Laws of God, as were claimed, for themselves, by the Livingstons and the Morrises, the Van Cortlandts and the Clintons, and their several supporters, in the Provincial Congress of Colonial New York ; and the annals of partisan malignity, ecclesiastical or civil, afford few instances wherein an ecclesiastical or civil enactment, no matter by what authority nor under what circumstances it may have been ordained Hnd promulgated, has been more relentlessly enforced, in its penalties, than this enactment of a revolutionary Congress was enforced, in the Colony and State of New York. Scarcely a homestead existed in Colonial Westchester-county, in which the unbridled despotism of a self-constituted Precinct or District or Town Committee did not display its ill-gotten, ill-regulated power, under the sanction of this enactment, protected and supported, whenever protection and support were needed to ensure entire success, by the local and the Continental military power or by hungry ruffians from over the border;* and there are enough of