There was an appendage to those Resolutions, which rendered the entire movement still more remarkable; and the facts are not the less significant because those who have written of the Resolutions and of those who wrote them and promoted their passage through the Provincial Congress, have studiously concealed not only the license for a despotism which they contained, but, also, that secret appendage which made entirely inoperative all the provisions which they contained on the subject of the proposed Independence of the Colonies from the Mother Country.

The controlling appendage, to which we allude and which has not been heretofore noticed by any historical writer, was an Agreement which was made between the members of the Provincial Congress who were then present, John Jay having been of the number and unquestionably the leader in the movement, " That the publishing of the aforegoing Resolves

1 By inuendo, if not directly, Bancroft, by making no mention of the letter of the Delegation of the Colony in the Continental Congress, leads his readers to suppose that these Resolutions were the outcome of the Kesolutions of the Convention of Virginia, which had been disposed of, as we have seen, several days previously and in a lesser number of words.

The same writer describes these Resolutions, after the rhetorical flourish, concerning the author of them, which we have elsewhere quoted, as "calling upon the Freeholders and Electors of the Colony to confer " on the Deputies whom they were about to choose full powers of admin- " istering Government, framing a Constitution, and deciding the great " question of Independence," [History of the United SUUes^ original edition, viii., 440; the same, centennial edition, v., 305.)