The careful reader will not have failed to see, in what has been written in this narrative and in the testimony which has been adduced to sustain it, the stern fact that, as far as the Colony of New York was concerned, and we write of no other Colony, the opposition to the measures of the Home Goverment, from 1763 until the Spring of 1775, which, subsequently, became more widely known as The American Revolution, was not, in the slightest degree, the outcome of a popular movement, in which the great body of the Colonists or any considerable portion of it arose in opposition to a wrong, inflicted or sought to be inflicted by the Parliament of Great Britain or by any other body, on the Colony or on any individual member of it, as has been rhetorically pretended, by orators and poets and historians, from that day until the present ; but, on the contrary, that it originated in the City of New York, among those of the commercial and mercantile classes, relatively few in number, whom, by reason of their greater wealth or of their higher social standing, we may properly regard, as they were regarded by themselves, as the aristocracy of the Colony -- with few, if any exceptions, they were those wealthy and enterprising Merchants, of various names and families and parties and sects and nationalities, each of whom had sunk, for all the purposes of that particular movement, whatever of individual or family or partisan or sectarian or national animosity, against others, he possessed, combined and acting in a common opposition to all those measures of the Home Government which had tended to break down the unblushing lawlessness of those confederated Merchants, in their entire disregard of the Navigation and Revenue Laws of the