WESTCHESTEK COUNTY.

Empire, .and to enforce on each of those Merchants, in his individual business, that obedience to the Laws which would be no more than his reasonable duty, while it would also tend to the suppression of that corruption of the local Revenue-officers and of that general practise of Smuggling from which he was so complacently acquiring wealth and influence. Except wherein these aristocratic Smugglers employed their ships' crews and the habUuis of the docks and slums of the City, for purposes of intimidation and political effect, the unfranchised masses of the Colonists in the country as well as in the City, with very rare exceptions, and the Freeholders of small estates and those Freeholders, of either large or small degree, who possessed no pecuniary interest in the foreign commerce of the Port, whether inhabitants of the City or of the rural Counties, had no part nor lot in the inception or in the organization or in the promotion of that opposition to the Home Government which, subsequently, in its more advanced stages, became known, at home and abroad, as The American Revolution.

In fact, while the aristocracy of the Colony was thus confederating and consolidating discordant elements and plotting and breeding disaffection to the Mother Country, the unfranchised Mechanics and Working-men, residents of the City and toilers for their daily bread, with occasional exceptions, pursued their respective industrial vocations, peacefully and industriously, without taking any greater interest in the anxieties of their aristocratic neighbors than those " well-born " " Gentlemen in Trade " were taking in their welfare or in that of their respective families ; while the great body of those who occupied the rural Counties of the Colony, also hard-working and peacefully inclined, knew little of and cared less for what was then disturbing the previously wellsustained quiet of the metropolitan counting-rooms.