It was not done because of any popular influence, present or prospective ; but only from the personal knowledge of its members, concerning the great wrongs to which, it was said, the Colonies had been subjected, concerning the rights and the interests of the Colonists which had been invaded, and concerning the measures which were necessary for the protection of those invaded rights and interests, for securing a redress of those great wrongs, and for the restoration of harmony and peace. In fact, that General Assembly, in all the proceedings of which mention has been made, more clearly and more faithfully represented the interests and the opinions and the inclinations, concerning governmental matters, of the aggregate body of the

Colonists, in New York, including every class, and sect, and political party -- and it possessed no authority to represent any other, and made no pretension to do so -- than either the Congress of the Continent or the fragmentary revolutionary faction within the Colony had done or possibly could do ; and there is very great reason for the belief that its orderly, and dignified, and more practically sensible influence would have been recognized beyond the limits of New York, and that it would have succeeded in its honorable efforts and evidently earnest purposes to restore, permanently and without dishonor, that harmony between the Colonies and the Mother Country which all professed to desire, had not the rashness of General Gage, in Massachusetts, during the brief recess which it had voted to itself, broken the well-strained barriers of Peace, loosed the worst elements of human nature in the Colonists, overturned everything which pertained to a Government of Law, and plunged the Continent into all the horrors of a needless and, necessarily, a bitter fratricidal War -- a War which, at its conclusion, the farmers of Westchester-county, or those of them who remained, more than all New England combined, had sorrowful reasons for remembering, because of the devastated homesteads, the divided families, the antagonistic neighbors, and the remembrance of plunder, and outrages, and butcheries, among them, of which that War had been so abundantly and so sadly productive.