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. Measures which were sincerely intended for the promotion of the common cause of the Colonies, in their struggle with the Home Government, -- measures which presented nothing else than political principles or recitals of facts which no one, of any sect or faction, pretended to dispute -- were opposed, vehemently and without measure, within as well as without the Assembly, only because they had not originated and were not supported before the House, by the opposite faction of the Opposition; and, with that hereditary, or sectional, or sectarian, or partisan bitterness which the lapse of years has served only to intensify, that work of depreciation and misrepresentation of those measures and of all who favored them, continues to disgrace much, at the present day, which is audaciously called "history."