Indeed, instead of relieving the Association which the Committee of Safety had recommended, from the uncertainties of its provisions, the only duty which had been assigned to John Jay and his two rustic associates, these astute partisans, in the bitterness of their animosities, did nothing else, in the way of the duty which had devolved on them, than to indulge in contemptuous sneers and inuendoes against those who had objected to the terms of the Committee of Safety's Association, without including, in their revised form, the provisions of safety, which the Provincial Congress had evidently intended to have inserted ; and, by the addition of words which were not in the former, they actually made the signers of the revised Association, more than before, the helpless subjects of two absolutely despotic bodies, over neither of whom could they bring any, even the slightest, restraining influence, no matter how objectionable and oppressive the Orders and enactments of either or both of those bodies might be. As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is ; and it will be difficult, in the light of such actions as this,
to convince any honest man that, whatever he may have been after he had reached that place in the office-bearing ranks of his countrymen which he so greatly coveted and of which he was so exceeding fond, while John Jay was still struggling for place, it mattered little under what master, he was neither more nor less upright, in what he said and did for the advancement of his individual or his party's purposes, than are office-seekers of our own day, with whom the end in view is generally made to justify the means.