For the purpose of extending its authority and of increasing its power, in whatever might arise, in its evident intent to control not only the great body of the unfranchised masses of every class, in the City of New York, 5 but the Colonial and the Home Govern- .

cal writers, who has inclined to tell the exact truth, on this subject ; and what he said of it occupied less than two lines of an octavo page.

3 The tCaucus, at Sam. Francis's, at which the appointment of the Committee was determined on and its Members nominated, defined, in its first Resolution, the purposes for which that Committee was to be appointed and the authority which should be vested in it -- " to correspond with the neighboring Colonies on the present important Crisis,'* excluding all other subjects, (Proceedings of the Meeting, among the" Broadsides, in the Library of the New-York Historical Society.)

* That James Duane and John Jay, to whom reference is here made, were not apt to recognize any fundamental obstruction to or requirement from whatever they should incline to do or not to do, is well known to every one who has closely studied the histories of the doings of those gentlemen, subsequently, in the various branches of official life to which they were respectively called.

5 In all the political operations of that period, the several Counties of the Colonies were regarded as entirely independent bodies, each controlling itself to the extent, even, of sending independent Delegates to the Continental Congress -- the centralization of authority, indeed, was the fundamental grievance against which all the Colonies were, then, raising their remonstrances and their opposition to the measures of the Home Government-- and it must not be supposed that, in the instanco referred to, in the text, the Committee sought the direct control of the masses, in any other County than in that of New York-- it sought no more than to secure the control of those, within the several Counties, who did control those masses, within their several neighborhoods ; and, therefore, it sought to