Governor Colden's enumeration of the Lutherans, the old Dutch, and "several Presbyterians" among the "friends of government" is merely a recognition that Toryism did not wholly depend for support upon the aristocratic church. The Lutherans, or Germans, and the "old Dutch," belonging to an alien race, deliberate, slow, easily satisfied with moderately free institutions, accustomed by all their traditions to live under authority without very jealously scrutinizing its nature or limiting its bounds, had ways of thinking quite foreign to those of the restless propagandists of American liberty, whom, indeed, they neither understood nor desired to understand. It was not a quarrel of these German and Dutch aliens; as a rule, they felt only a languid interest in it, and held aloof from it until forced to choose sides, when, as a rule, following the conservative instincts of their natures, they preferred the side of established order to that of revolutionary convulsion. They really constituted a passive element, and were loyalists mainly in the sense that they were not disturbers of the prevailing conditions. As for the "several Presbyterians" claimed by Governor Colden as belonging to the anti-revolutionary party, his application of that diminutive numerical to them was well chosen. In earlier times the name "Presbyterians" was generic for all who were not of the "Court" party-- that is, for all who arrayed themselves politically against the " Episcopalian," or arrogant ruling, class-- the Church of England having been the institution of those who cherished peculiarly their British breeding and antecedents, holding themselves as a superior society amid a mixed citizenship of colonials, ami, consistently with such pretensions, forming an always reliable prop for the crown and the crown's officers. To be a " Presbyterian " in the political meaning of the word in New York at that early period was to be identified with the factious populace, the populace of Smith and Alexander, Chief Justice Morris and Peter Zenger, al-