The only objection raised against the reading of the Memorial was the bare suspicion that " it contained " matter derogatory to the supreme legislative power " of Great Britain ;' ; and on that suspicion, alone, the Memorial not having been even described, the House sustained the Minister, and declined to allow the Memorial to be read, by a vote of twenty-five to fortyfive, sending it, of course, into the legislative limbo. 2 Well might Edmund Burke subsequently say of that rejection of the Memorial and of the Remonstrance of the General Assembly of Colonial New York, by the two Houses of Parliament, " nothing done in Parlia- " ment seemed to be better calculated to widen the " breach between Great Britain and the Colonies." 3

2 Almon's Parliamentary Register, ii., 152-156; Annual Register for 1775, "History of Europe," *116, *117.

It is a reasonable case, in such instances as those cited and in those of the earlier historians of the American Revolution who lived and wrote in Europe, that no more than the rejection, by the Parliament, of the two papers which were sent to that legislature by the General Assembly of New York, was mentioned in the writings of those gentlemen ; but there is no valid excuse for those, in America, who have exhausted all their resources of misrepresentation and abuse on that General Assembly, charging it with having been everything which was detrimental to the honor or the integrity or the interests of the Colonies, and closing their respective narratives, on the subject of that Assembly, by reciting no more than the facts, stated in the text -- that its Memorial and Remonstrance had been rejected by the two Houses of Parliament, without having been read -- without having pretended to explain how it were possible that so bad an Assembly as they had described, could, by any possibility, have been, the author and publisher of such papers as, because of their peculiarly republican averments, the Home Government and the Parliament would not allow to be even read in their presence.