It is said that the Report and Resolutions were unanimously adopted by the Provincial Congress, evidently without the slightest consideration of their characters and probable result, and certainly duriDg the latter portion of an afternoon session of the Congress, in which, both before and after the presentation of them, that body was crowded with other and very important matters of business ; and it is said to have ordered, at that time, that the Resolutions should be printed in all the newspapers which were then published in the City of New York and in handbills ; and " that the Resolutions be read to every " person to whom the Association thereby recom- " mended shall be offered for subscription." 2

Whatever the real motives of those who had de-

1 Journal of the Provincial '1776." s Ibid.

Congress, "Thursday Afternoon, June S

WESTCHESTEE COUNTY.

clined to sign the Association which the Committee of Safety had prescribed, had been, they were such as had led the Provincial Congress to notice them, respectfully, and to lead that body to move for the removal of the objections which had been thus reasonably raised against that Association, by those whom the Provincial Congress's Committee was constrained to recognize as " friends to the American cause ; '' and it ill became John Jay, therefore, to display so many of the idiosyncrasies of his generally unamiable character, in the contemptuous and singularly insulting words which he applied to those of his fellow "friends of the American cause'' who had presumed to take their knowledge of the legal obligations contained in that objectionable Association from some one else than from himself and his Congressional confrerie ; and an impartial examination of the two forms of Association, and a careful comparison of that revised form, which he induced the Provincial Congress to substitute for that against which the objections had been raised, with the latter, will clearly indicate to the reader that the writer of that revised form had permitted his evil passions to get the better of his personal integrity, when he belittled himself by reporting an Association which was even more objectionable in its provisions than that which had been objected to, dressed and decorated with a meaningless Preamble, evidently intended for the beguilement of the unwary, but without containing a single word of provision, either in the Preamble or in the Association itself, that the signers of that revised instrument, by that act, would not deprive themselves of their Eights as Militia, and subject themselves to be taken beyond the limits of the Colony, even to the extent of the most distant of the confederated Colonies, whenever some body, over whom they could exercise no control, should incline to order them thither.