If the Provincial Congress possessed no authority, legal or revolutionary, " to declare this Colony to be "and continue independent of the Crown of Great "Britain," as both common sense and history, as well as the first of John Jay's series of enabling Resolutions, unquestionably determined, those enabling Resolutions, carefully concealed and rendered entirely inoperative by the Agreement which was subsequently appended to them, assuredly did not supply nor provide for a supply of that peculiar authority which John Jay and the Provincial Congress, then, regarded as necessary, for a warrant for such a declaration ; and, consequently, that Congress was, and would necessarily continue lo be, as it had previously been, without the slightest authority, legal or revolutionary, to take any action whatever, which tended toward a separation of the Colony from the Mother Country. The carefully concealed Agreement accomplished the evident purposes of its treacherous authors, however; and the Delegation of the Colony in the Continental Congress, at the same time, was enabled, by it, to make its opposition, in that body, to the Resolution and the Declaration of Independence, less offensive to the majority of that Congress and to the revolutionary elements throughout the Continent; but, notwithstanding these successes, those Res')lutions, as well as the Agreement which was appended to them, were deceptive and fraudulent in their character, and intended by their author and promoters for nothing else than for the advancement of deceptive and fraudulent purposes. The reader will see, very soon, with what little respect the declaration which formed the basis of those Resolutions, as well as the Resolutions themselves, was regarded by the same John Jay and by nearly the same Provincial Congress -- then as deficient in authority " to declare " this Colony to be and continue independent of the "Crown of Great Britain," as it had been, twentyeight days previously -- when, on the ninth of July succeeding, they actually did declare this Colony to be and continue independent of the Mother Country their acknowledged want of authority, from any source, to do any such action, to the contrary not withstanding.