He will remember, also, what has been stated concerning the General Assembly of the Colony ; its organization ; its bold and determined opposition to the obnoxious Colonial policy of the Home Government ; its sturdy refusal to become auxiliary to or identified with the Continental Congress, notwithstanding it was not less determined in its opposition to the Ministry ; its measures for securing from the Parliament of Great Britain, the only body from whom it could be obtained, a complete redress of what the Colonists regarded as grievances ;

and the unsuccessful result of its efforts, in that commendable undertaking, only by reason of the boldness of its declarations and of the audacity of its pretensions to rank, as the legally constituted representatives of a free people, notwithstanding they were Colonists.

It will be remembered by all who are familiar with the history of Colonial New York, however, that, although the aristocracy of that old and respectable Colony had always been consistent and united, in its undeviating disregard of the real political rights of the working masses, those in the rural districts as well as those in the Cities, there had been, during many years before the period of which we write \_May, 1775], and there was, then, a bitter feud, existing within itself, between two rival families and their respective associated families and their several adherents. It will, also, be remembered that, during a long period of years, one of those powerful families and its friends had occupied all or nearly all the high places in the Colonial Government, and had dispensed the extensive patronage of that Government and disposed of its valuable emoluments among those who were known to have been the friends and adherents of the family, agreeably to the dictates of its own controlling will ; while the other of those two antagonistic families and those who had been its friends and adherents, during the same long period, had uneasily and unsatisfactorily reposed on nothing else than on their own rural respectability, without any place in the Government of the Colony, without any of that influence which place had afforded so bounteously to its more powerful rival, and without any of those emoluments of office which, more than almost all else, would have been so exceedingly acceptable to every Scotchman and to every other within whose veins the controlling blood was Scotch.