ployed it, to resist the execution of the Stamp-Act, to prevent the landing of the East India Company's Tea, and to make other demonstrations of seeming popular approval or disapproval, on other subjects of public polity or of governmental policy, whenever the political or the pecuniary interests of those "Gentlemen in Trade'' who had employed it, seemed to warrant the outlay of the means which had been required to produce a desired result: to our hand, meanwhile, can be assigned, of all the various important subjects comprising the political and military histories of the Colony or of the Continent, at all periods, only the description of those events, during the period of the American Eevolution and that of the War which followed and established that political Eevolution, which, in themselves or in the consequences arising from them, directly affected the peace, the happiness, or the interests of those who, during those eventful periods, were residents of the rural County of Westchester, in New York.

The urgent appeals with which the newspapers had been filled, year by year, and the inflammatory handbills which had been posted throughout the City, whenever the purposes of "the Merchants and " Traders " of the City of New York had required their powerful, but, sometimes, questionable, co operation in opposing the Colonial policy of the Home Government, had gradually taught " the Inhabitants'' of that City-- as, on such occasions only, the unfranchised Mechanics and Workingmen were delicately called, by those who had thus resorted to them -- with more or less thoroughness, concerning the personal and political " Eights of Man and of Englishmen," as those Eights had been defined, from time to time, by those " Merchants and Traders " or by their well-paid Counsel, for the promotion of the particular purposes of those more aristocratic gentlemen; and these "In- " habitants " had also learned, from all those varied teachings and from their own well-trained reflections, that the particular Eights which had been so earnestly and learnedly claimed by their high-toned neighbors, were not less the Eights of the unfranchised masses, and equally the birthright of their children.