usual indoor and outdoor recreations, during the preceding Winter ; and to return to the labors of the season, on their farms or elsewhere, during the earlier weeks of the Spring, as they had done, before, year after year and generation after generation, knowing little and caring less concerning that bitter struggle for commercial gain, no matter how lawlessly conducted, or concerning that equally bitter struggle for the honors and emoluments of political place, no matter with what auxiliaries nor with what disregard of individual and social proprieties and of public morals that struggle should be conducted, which had kept the neighboring City and the entire seaboard in an unceasing and disgraceful turmoil, during that entire period.

It is not now evident, if it ever was, that these honest, hard-working, contented men, in any portion of that unceasing and undisguised indifference to the clamor and the unblushing immorality and the audacious lawlessness of politicians, of high or of low degree, beyond the borders of the County, which they had steadily and consistently presented, were really offenders against any law, human or divine ; and it will require more evidence than has yet been presented by those who have spoken or written adversely concerning those quiet Westchester-county farmers and their unostentatious conservatism, to establish the fact, if it be a fact, that, regardless of that peculiar standing which was awarded to Westchestercounty, during the period now under consideration, and regardless of the recognized manhood of those who then lived there, the " consent " of those farmers, previously given, was not quite as necessary to have warranted the invasion of their rural quiet and contentment, by those, not of themselves, who were eager to thrust upon them, uninvited, new political methods, new political principles, and a new form of political government, none of which had yet secured their favor and approval, as it was, then, and as it has ever since been, assumed to have been necessary, everywhere, before a political right could be disturbed or a new form of political government be established.