Indeed, the high-toned "Gentlemen in Trade/' guided by their acute legal and political advisers, John Jay and James Duane, determined to continue the same system of contemptuous deceit and treachery which had characterized all their previous political intercourse with the Working-men of the Colony; and, in doing so, they very clearly indicated, a second time, how ill-qualified they were to navigate the troubled waters of Colonial politics.

The first formal organization of those who were in confederated opposition to the Home Government of that period; which was made within the City of New York and, probably, within the Colony -- the Caucus of the confederated Merchants, at Sam. Francis's, in May, 1774, which had been evidently assembled under the inspiration of James Duane and John Jay, who

were notMerchants, but Lawyers -- was really intended quite as much for the adoption of measures which should practically rebuke the evidently growing sense of their own political power which has been recently seen arising among the Working-men and the lowly, throughout the City, if for nothing else, as for the adoption of measures in further opposition to the Home Government, to which it was nominally devoted ; and, by adroitness in their management of the movement -- the master-spirits of that aristocratic assemblage were not novices in political chicanery -- while they really secured, more firmly than ever, the controlling authority in the confederated Opposition to the Home Government, in the aristocracy of the Colony, those master-spirits not only laid the foundations of their own and their family's further advancement, but they, also, so far placated the disaffected Working-men, by making the greater number of their leaders a helpless and powerless minority in the proposed Committee of Fifty-one, that peace and harmony of action, thoroughout the entire Opposition, were immediately restored -- they had again deceived the masses of the people ; and, once more, a share of that confidence which those lowly masses had reposed in their aristocratic neighbors, was entirely forfeited.