Against those unoffending farmers -- as their accusers have shown, they were nothing else -- with a malignant zeal which betrayed its selfish, puritanic origin, the writer of that letter prayed that they should be arrested; that their properties, real and personal, should be seized, and escheated, and confiscated ; that "costs" should be paid, therefrom, into the willing hands of those who should have thus invaded their individual Rights -- Rights which had been guaranteed to each of them, by the Constitution and the Laws of the land -- that their homes should be violated and destroyed ; that their families should be made beggars, and be cast penniless on the world; and that, except among those who thus sought warrants to become local despots, nothing else than individual and domestic misery and general devastation and ruin should be aimed at and obtained. Can anything more . atrocious be conceived ? Can those who could calmly and deliberately devise such outrages, to be inflicted on a peaceful community, and that community their own immediate neighbors and townsmen, be regarded as anything else than monstrosities, in human form, in which only the baser and most brutal passions had found places? But, after all, these -- the letter and the passions which had inspired it and the hand which had written it -- were only the legitimate outcome of the barbarous propositions which John Jay and Gouverneur Morris and their partisan associates, taking advantage of a short period of peculiar anxiety and of labors of more than usual variety and importance, had led the jaded and almost exhausted Provincial Congress, it may