clined to sign the Association which the Committee of Safety had prescribed, had been, they were such as had led the Provincial Congress to notice them, respectfully, and to lead that body to move for the removal of the objections which had been thus reasonably raised against that Association, by those whom the Provincial Congress's Committee was constrained to recognize as " friends to the American cause ; " and it ill became John Jay, therefore, to display so many of the idiosyncrasies of his generally unamiable character, in the contemptuous and singularly insulting words which he applied to those of his fellow " friends of the American cause" who had presumed to take their kno\vledge of the legal obligations contained in that objectionable Association from some one else than from himself and his Congressional confrerie ; and an impartial examination of the two forms of Association, and a caretiil comparison of that revised form, which he induced the Provincial Congress to substitute for that against which the objections had been raised, with the latter, will clearly indicate to the reader that the writer of that revised form had permitted his evil passions to get the better of his personal integrity, when he belittled himself by reporting an Association which was even more objectionable in its provisions than that which had been objected to, dressed and decorated with a meaningless Preamble, evidently intended for the beguilement of the unwary, but without containing a single word of provision, either in the Preamble or in the Association itself, that the signers of that revised instrument, by that act, would not deprive themselves of their Eights as Militia, and subject themselves to be taken beyond the limits of the Colony, even to the extoot of the most distant of the confederated Colonies, whenever some body, over whom they could exercise no control, should incline to order them thither.