On the sixteenth of March, Isaac Wilkins, from the Committee appointed to prepare it, reported " the " Draft of a Petition to the King ; " and, immediately afterwards, Crean Brush, from the Committee appointed to prepare it, reported " a Draft of a Memorial to the Lords." During the same day, James De Lancey, from the Committee appointed to prepare it, reported " the Draft of a Representation and Bemon- "strance to the Commons of Great Britain ; " and the Assembly promptly referred all those papers, for consideration, to a Committee of the Whole House. 3

On the twenty-fourth of March, the Assembly resolved itself into a Committee of the Whole House, upon the Draught of a Petition to the King, Colonel Benjamin SeamaD, of Richmond-county, being in the Chair; and, again, the minority displayed its factional animosity by presenting Amendment after Amendment, by far the greater number of them being merely verbal, without disturbing either the sense or the spirit of the original. In one instance, however, very unaccountably and not very consistently, Colonel Philip Schuyler appeared to have entertained a more than usually tender regard for His Majesty's " prerogative," in the matter of the Paper Currency of the Colony, " in the preservation of which prerog- " ative," he said, " we are deeply interested ; " and an Amendment, on that subject, which he submitted, was adopted by the House, without a division. Another Amendment, concerning the Judiciary of the Colony, and entirely cancelling the paragraph, on that subject, which the Committee had reported, was submitted by George Clinton, of Ulster-county, and agreed to, by an unanimous vote of the House ; and another Amendment, submitted by Colonel Frederic Philipse, by striking the words " seem to,'' from one of the paragraphs, and, by doing so, making the Acts relating to Boston and the Colony of Massachusetts- Bay really '' establish adangerous precedent, by inflict- "ing Punishment without Ihe formality of a Trial," instead of only seeming to do so, as the original paragraph described them, really strengthened the Petition, in its assertion of the Grievances to which the Colonies had been subjected.* As the. records of the closing portion of the proceedings of the Committee of the Whole House and those of all that the House,