If " he is to be judged according to the regulations of the "Congress, they have ordained the Provincial Con- " gress of New York or the Committee of the county " of West Chester, to be his judges. Neither the "laws of either colony nor the regulations of the " Congress give any countenance to the mode of " treatment which he has met with. But considered " in either light, he conceives it must appear unjust, " cruel, arbitrary, and tyrannical}

retaining our own well-considered opinion that Samuel Seabury was nothing elBe than a learned, sincere, truthful, honorable, and fearless man, incapable of such dishonorable trickery as has been attributed to him. Others are at liberty, of course, to think differently.

1 The reader of the two preceding paragraphs, in which the captive responded to the first and fourth of the charges which his captors had presented against him, cannot fail to find evidence, of tbo highest character, that, in his political opiDions, Samuel Seabury was, at that time, as he had previously been, in exact accord with Isaac Wilkins and Frederic Philipse, also of Westchester-county ; and that he was and had been in accord with the great body of Americans, believing and maintaining that the Home Government had invaded the personal and political rights of the Colonists ; that the latter had just reason for complaints and opposition to the Colonial and Home Governments, because of those grievances ; that the Colonists were justified in their opposition to those obnoxious measures and to those who enacted and promoted the execution of them, as far as that opposition involved no violation ot the Rights of Persons or Properties nor of the Laws of the Land; and that the Continental Congress of 1774, until it passed beyond the prescribed limits of its authority, as that authority had been specifically defined by its constituent Colonies, and until it assumed the unwarranted authority of legislation, thereby closing the open door of reconciliation with the Mother Country, for the promotion of which it had been expressly and solely constituted, was worthy of the respect and support which were given to it, by nearly every one, in the Colony.