It was a mistake, as well as a crime, therefore, to assume authority for the arrest and imprisonment of men and for the sequestration of their properties and the impoverishment of the aged and of the dependent and helpless, without a shadow of legal authority and in audacious defiance of it ; without a shadow of existing necessity, even from the standpoint of the Rebellion, for the enactment of such extreme measures ; and with a reasonable assurance that a manly selfrespect among those who were proscribed, would be surely aroused, not only for their own and their families' protection, but, as far as they could do it, for the suppression of that haughty lawlessness which had presumed to create and to enforce so grave an enactment of despotism. It was loudly declared to have been the most ardent wish of even the most advanced advocate of rebellion, to have secured a reconciliation with the Mother Country and a restoration of harmony and good-will among the adverse parties throughout the several Colonies : 1 how much more of wisdom there would have been displayed among those who had seized the reins of government, therefore, had they practised their hands in the work of reconciliation and harmony and goodwill among their neighbors, instead of driving the staid and the quiet and the conscientious and the law-abiding, among the latter, into active and bitter partisanship, and of spreading alarm and strife and misery and ruin over the entire County. There might have been fewer transformations of moral and intellectual pigmies into potent political giants -- there might have been a smaller number of fortunes rapidly and largely increased from the plunder of neighboring better - provided-for households and farmyards-- but there would have been, also, fewer outrages against the Laws of both man and of God ; less occasion for bitterness among the descendants of those who were, then, neighbors in locality, if not in fact ; and very much less for the faithful historian to condemn and to denounce, while reciting the annals of the American Revolution, as that Revolution was developed