The Provincial Congress having " considered " the Report, it also adopted it, evidently without debate or a division of the house, -- Westchester-county was unrepresented in that exceedingly important vote, owing to the absence of a quorum of its Deputation ; -- and, after the Congress had ordered the Resolutions to be published in all the newspapers in the Colony and in handbills, the latter for distribution in the rural Counties, 2 it appears to have dismissed the entire subject from its further attention.

The Resolutions which were thus adopted and published, form the foundation of the entire structure of the Constitution of the State of New York, in all its varied forms; and, for that reason, we have not hesitated to find places, in this narrative, for all which concerned them. We are not insensible of the fact, however, that the fair words which they contain were deceptive ; that the voice and the votes to which the election of the proposed founders of a State was thus referred, were not those of ''the Inhabitants" who had figured so largely in the preliminary Report, but only those of the Freeholders and those of the tenantry who were of the wealthier class, to the exclusion of the tenantry of small properties and of the Mechanics and Working-men of the Colony, and certainly to the exclusion of those who had been officiallyproscribedand officially outraged, and forwhom, under subsequent action of the Congress, yet more atrocious proscription and persecution and outrage were held in reserve. We are not insensible, also, that, notwithstanding the seeming eagermss of its authors, at that time, to remove the "many and great "inconveniences," as well as that power of despotic oppression and tyranny which " attended the mode of "Government by Congress and Committees," of some of which "inconveniences" and despotism the reader has been already made acquainted, they were not subsequently so eager -- they certainly loitered over their work until after the Royal Commissioners had exhausted their ingenuity as well as their authority in fruitless efforts to effect a Reconciliation and to restore harmony between the Colonies and the Mother Country ; and, even at that later day, John Morin Scott and Alexander McDougal and others of the same class having, meantime, obtained other places