farmers of Westchestcr-county -- they would have been less than men, and unworthy of either respect or sympathy, had they remained passive spectators of what was then in progress, for the seizure of their persons, for the sequestration of their homes and of their estates, and for the impoverisliment of their aged parents, of their wives, and of their dependent children, without just cause, without due process of Law, and by those who were in acknowledged rebellion against their recognized Sovereign. Indeed, the honest, hard-working yeomanry, throughout the entire extent of the County, those of revolutionary as well as those of conservative associations, was immediately thrown into a state of the most intense excitement; suspicion between those who had been peaceful neighbors and friends, was aroused and fostered ; memories of half- forgotten piques and (juarrels were recalled ; and the animosities and the jealousies and the misunderstandings and the disputes of the past were revived and intensified ; and, while the more zealous of the party of the Rebellion were loud in their threats and aggressive in their actions, those who constituted the great body of the inhabitants of the County and who were peaceful in all their relations, anxiously watched the progress of events, and, in some notable instances, denounced the enactments of the Provincial Congress and the Congress who had enacted them ; declared their confidence -- their ill-founded but honest confidence -- that the Home Government would soon interfere for their protection ; armed and organized themselves for their immediate security ; and established strong patrols, from among themselves, to guard against surprise, by night or by day. Violence on the one side, of actions as well as of words, begat violence on the other. A lawless assault on the jiersons or the properties of the conservatives and the loyal, by the promptings of embittered human nature and the unwritten law of retaliation, was followed, sooner or later, by equally lawless assaults on the persons or on the families or on the properties of those, of the opposite party, who had been the original aggressors ; and, very seldom, on those occasions, was a tooth or an eye regarded as a sufficient equivalent for the tooth or the eye which had been taken.