It is, indeed, true, in this connection, that the aristocratic Merchants and Ship-owners, in the City of New York, had been, during many years, more or less reasonably aggrieved by reason of the governmental interference with their well-established and very profitable " illicit trade," to which reference has been made : it is also true that, for the purpose of influencing and, if possible, of intimidating the Home , Government!, in their opposition to that Home Government, because of those assumed grievances, those high-toned lawbreakers had repeatedly resorted to the desperate means of, first, appealing to the maxims and the teachings of the fundamental law; of employing the former for their partisan slogan, and the latter for the foundations of their passionate appeals ; and, sometimes, second, of employing, directly or indirectly, the floating and the less respectable portions of the population of the City, as supernumeraries on the stage on which they were acting their several parts in the drama of their seeming patriotism -- means which were as unreal, in their hands, as their own '' p.atrotism," so

called, was deceptive ; and, particularly, in the lastmentioned of the two means employed, as hazardous as it was fraudulent -- but it is also true that, while the maxims and the teachings of the fundamental law which they so freely bandied, were only words of convenience, meaning nothing beyond the end for securing which they had been thus employed, their auxiliaries, thus enlisted from among the unfranchised and lowly, if not from among the vicious, were, by those who employed them, only regarded as temporary employees, engaged for the performance of particular services, of more or less danger and lawlessness ; and not as common heirs to a common inheritance for which both they and those who had thus employed them, as parties possessing an equal interest therein-- as the maxims and the teachings of the fundamental law, with which both the employers and the employees, in this instance, were familiar, had clearly indicated to both -- were jointly contending.