There was a fitness, therefore, that those of the Committee who had honestly and unselfishly opposed the aggressions of the Home Government, should cease to allow their names and whatever influence those names might possess, to be used by those who had betrayed the confidence which had been reposed in them, directly, for the advancement of their own personal ends, and, indirectly, for the promotion of Revolution, if not for that of Rebellion ; and there was a peculiar fitnes*, also, that, whatever those conservative members of the Committee of Fifty-one should do or decline to do, in the interests of the Colonists and of the Colony, they should not remain, associated with, if not controlled by, those of the opposite faction of the confederated party of the Opposition, whose ultimate object, very clearly, was nothing else than the advancement to place and political authority of those who were its leaders, even if that advancement should be made at the cost of a Revolution and of a Civil War. The Committee of Correspondence did well,

therefore, in thus providing for its own dissolution, without permitting itself to be crowded out of its existence by that faction of its own political party for whom it had, generally, no respect -- by that faction of that party of the Opposition, hitherto its only political antagonist, which, then, appeared with John Jay and James Duane, lately two of the Committee, among its nominal leaders.

The result of the interview which the Committee of Correspondence had thus invited -- one of the high contracting parties rapidly approaching its own dissolution, with only twenty-three of its fifty-one members present, and with eight of the twenty-three predestinated by their associates to an early retirement : the other of the two parties to the conference flushed with that most recent and most important of its victories over the aristocracy of the City -- was a determination to nominate sixty persons who should be agreeable to both the Committee of Correspondence and the Committee of the Mechanics, all of whose names should be submitted to the Freeholders and Freemen of the City, at a Meeting to be called for that purpose, at the City Hall, for their approval and election ; ' all of which was evidently done and completed, on the twenty-second ot November, exactly in conformity with the programme which the two political "rings" of that period, consolidated for the purpose of promoting their mutual political interests, had already prepared and promulgated. 2