"Such a community as that which constituted the County of Westchester," says lie, "a community of well-situated, intelligent, and well-to-do farmers, diligently and discreetly attending to its own affairs, without the disturbing influences of any village or county coterie, has generally been distinguished for its rigid conservatism in all its relations; and such a community has always been more inclined to maintain those various long-continued, well-settled, and generally satisfactory relations with more than ordinary tenacity, preferring very often to continue an existing inconvenience or an intangible wrong, to which it had become accustomed, rather than to accept, in its sterol, the possibility of an advantage, indefinitely promised, in an untried and uncertain change." This curious theory he supports in his application of it to Westchester County by the single tangible statement that "there is not any known evidence of the existence, at any time, of any material excitement among these farmers, on any subject." It is of course unprofitable to discuss either the general proposition of Mr. Dawson concerning the uniform natural conservatism of intelligent rural communities, or his claim that this county had always before the Revolution been exempt from political excitement. In view, however, of Mr. Dawson's reputation as a minute and entirely well-meaning historical writer -- a reputation appreciated especially by his many surviving friends in Westchester County, -- his study of our Revolutionary period can not, in a work on the general history of the county, escape the passing criticism which its spirit merits, as, on the other hand, the abundant historical data that we owe to his researches can not escape grateful recognition. It is greatly to be regretted that to an essay prepared with so much painstaking he should, on grounds not only the most unjustified but the most trivial, have given a general tendency of such extreme unaccept ability to American readers.