On the other hand, the General Assembly of Colonial New York, the legitimacy of whose organization and the entire legality of whose action, in behalf of the common cause, no one has ever presumed to question ; without compromising its dignity, as a General Assembly; with that common sense which, in Europe as well as in America, was, then, so pe-

1 Credentials of the Delegation from Virginia, to the Congress.

2 Credentials of the Delegation from Mussaelmsetts, to the Congress.

3 It is matter of history, well known to every student, that the action of the Congress on the Suffolk-county Besolntions, (Journal of the Congress, "Saturday, September 17,1774, A.M."), closed the door of reconciliation against the Colonies, and led the Home Government to regard the great body of the. Colonists as only rebels, against whom it had become the duty of that Government to throw the weight of its authority, a determination for which those Colonists, in their individual relations, had given no warrant, either in their actions or their dispositions.

culiarly uncommon ; without entangling itself with any questionable alliance ; and without belittling its legitimate influence by expressing its official sympathy with any other body, even in relation to those measures which were similar, in character and purpose, to those of its own enactment -- that General Assembly, quite as clearly and quite as energetically as the Congress had done, in behalf of its constituents, boldly declared the Grievances of those whom it represented, in a clear recital of the several Acts of Parliament which had been employed by the Home Government for the oppression of the Colonists ; and, in addition to that recital of specific Statutes which were grievous in their provisions, it adopted a series of Resolutions, declaratory of the general Rights of the Colonists, as Englishmen, " to which they were " equally entitled with their fellow-subjects in Great "Britain" -- Resolutions which no one could have made stronger, in support of the common cause.