It were useless to pretend, with any respect for the truth, that the great body of the inhabitants of the Colonies was favorably inclined to or particularly interested in, a change in those who ruled them or in the manner of that rule, since it was perfectly evident that they would not be permitted to exercise any greater political authority nor to have their labors lessened nor their wants better supplied, under one than under the other form of Government ; or, in New York, under the administration of the Livingston regime instead of that of the De Lancey, under the last of which they had hitherto lived ; but the leaders of the Rebellion, elsewhere

than in New York, seeing before them a semblance of greater consequence to themselves, in the proposition for Independence, were rapidly concentrating their efforts to accomplish that end. The desire for such a change was, also, sometimes promoted by the consciousness, among those whose consciences had not become charred by their hankering for offices, of that evident hypocrisy in pretending to an earnest loyalty toward a monarch against whom they were waging an open and recognized public War, with which the Committees and the Congresses of the Rebellion had continued to affront the common sense and the morality of Christendom ; and that moral inclination to Independence, and those other inclinations, in the same direction, which were prompted by less holy influences, were all strengthened by the alarm which was produced by information that the Colonies had been formally declared to be in rebellion ; that mercenaries had been employed to assist in reducing them to subjection, in which all classes would be subjected to a common ruin -- a repetition, on a larger scale, but on the other side, of what had been done, already, by the leaders of the Rebellion, in New York, against the peaceful, agricultural inhabitants of Westchester and Duchess and Queens and Richmond-counties ; that the Indians were to be employed by the Home-Government, for the purpose of harassing the frontiers and threatening the inland settlements and villages ; and that the Slaves were to be withdrawn from their masters, as far as possible, and armed in the service of the King.