" Ezekiel Halley, " Joseph Benedict,

" Chairmen.

" To THE Honourable the Pbovincial Congress." '

These two letters were presented to the Provincial Congress, on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth of June; read before that body ; and ordered " to remain "for further consideration; " ^ and there, as far as we have knowledge, they have remained, from that day until this -- the Provincial Congress certainly paid no further attention to them.

Closely connected with it, if it was not really the basis of that policy of proscription and persecution and devastation which peculiarly distinguished the entire series of Provincial Congresses and Committees of Safety of the Colony of New York, as well as the early Conventions and Legislatures of the State, after the Colony had ceased to exist, was the series of Tests, known as Associations, which were enacted, first, by the Continental Congress of 1774 and, subsequently, in various forms, by the Provincial Congresses of New York, b^" the latter of whom and by their several Committees of Safety they were, also, rigidly enforced, as we have seen, in other portions of this narrative.

One of these Tests, or Associations, adopted by a Provincial Committee of Safety, was proved to have been so etitirely subversive of the j)ersonal Rights of those to whom it was oflered, that numbers who had previously favored or acquiesced in the Rebellion, peremptorily declined to sign it, preferring rather to be considered as disaflected and to be disarmed, as such,' and to suffer all the other pains and penalties and insults tf) which those who were known as " dis- " affected " were continually subjected.