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

8 " To do justice oven to rebels, let it here be meulioned that * * * Nay, " so far were they from interfering with the law, that the Magistrates " continued in full possession of the. Civil powers and the Courts of Jus- " tico were open in the usual manner until the Declaration of Indepen- " deuce. In April Term, 1776, several rebel soldiers were indicted for "some Petty Larcenies, tried, convicted, and punished by order of the "Court without any interfereuce of the Military; their Officers at- " tended tho trials, beard the evidence, and upon their conviction declared that amplo justice was doue them, and thanked the Judge for " his candor and impartiality, during tho course of the trials." -- Jones's History of New York duriuy the Revolutionary War, i., 137.