They have been the themes, sometimes, of ignorant and unscrupulous bigots and, sometimes, of intelligent and unscrupulous tricksters ; sometimes a personal and sometimes a local end has been served by either a falsification or a concealment of the truth, concerning them ; and, sometimes, fragments of useless and glittering rhetoric, strung together, as farmers string fragments of useless and glittering tin and display them in order to deceive and to scatter unsuspecting birds from their cornfields, in like manner, have been employed by literary prestidigitators, in order to deceive those who are less intelligent than themselves, concerning that As-

1 Journal of the House, "Die Veneris, 10 ho., A.M., the 31st March, " 1775."

2 Journal of the Howie, "Die Sabbati, 10 ho., A.M., the 1st April, "1778."

3 Journal of the House, " Die Lunee, 10 ho., A.M., the 3d April, 1775."

sembly, and its members, and their doings ; and, through that deception, to promote their own or their party's or their sectional purposes. Individual members of that Assembly, men of honor and unimpeachable integrity, have been stigmatized as " wretches," and as " the veriest reptiles on earth " and charged with " corruption " and every kindred vice -- some of them were driven from their families and their homes ; others of them were lawlessly seized and carried from their families and their homes, exiled, and held in lawless bondage ; and others of them were stripped of their patrimonial estates or of the estates of their own creation -- only because they had preferred, as Members of that Assembly, to assert the Grievances under which the Colony was said to have been laboring and to demand a Redress of those alleged Grievances, not with any less distinctness of words nor with any less firmness of manner, but after a manner and through instrumentalities of their own selection and which possessed their greater confidence, rather than after a manner and through instrumentalities which others would have thrust on them, which their own sense of fitness and adaptability had not approved, which were controlled by men in whose noisy pretensions to personal and political integrity they could not repose confidence.