spired and directed by controlling members of those commercial and mercantile classes,for which property the local authorities had neglected or declined to compensate the owners -- and, besides the indifference of the farmers, who constituted a vastly great majority of the adult males who were permanent residents of the Colony, which we have described, it encountered, from its inception, the earnest and active and unscrupulous handful of "fire-eaters," within the City of New York, because of the moderate temper in which it had been proposed ; because of the disregard of the pretensions of the Town of Boston, with which they were in harmonious correspondence ; and because the authors and promoters of the project of convening such a Congress had disregarded the aspirations of some of those "fire-eaters" for places in the Delegation who would be sent to that Congress, as representatives of the Colony of New York ; and, reasonably enough, it encountered, also, the opposition, direct and decided, of that very small number who personally constituted the Colonial Government, and by some of those who occupied places of honor and emolument under its authority, and, most zealously of all these, by those hungry sycophants of authority -- hangers on of that Colonial Government who never failed to "sneeze, whenever it took snuff" -- the aggregate of whom was powerless in its legitimate opposition because of the smallness of its numbers.

Notwithstanding the direct opposition of the little clique of fire-eating revolutionists and that of the larger and more influential circle of the Colonial Government and its adherents -- "friends of Govern- " ment," as they called themselves -- and the chilly indifference of the great body of the farmers, constituting the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Colony, that Congress of the Colonies was convened under the auspices of those among whom it was originated ; was turned from the pacific purposes for which it had been called, into others which were revolutionary in their character ; and was dissolved, to take its place in the history of that very eventful period.