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

* "The information you have received, in respect to Captain Cuthbert, "is, I believe, in part true, but hiis originated from a private pique, and "is much exaggerated. You will observe I have bought his wheat from "him, which he readily sold me, at the Sitnie time complained, most " bitterly, of being threatened with the lo.ss of his life, by the sanu- Don "you mentioned, who.