But the revival, with largely increased authority and without any diminution of malignancy, of the notorious political Inquisition -- the Committee to detect Conspiracies -- afforded abundant evidence of the purpose of the master-spirits of the new-formed Convention to keep apart those who might have been united, had a redress of grievances been the only purpose of the movements; and to drive over into the ranks of the Royal Army or into the service of that Army, those who, under a more judicious policy, would not have become enemies, eager for retaliation, even if they had not become very active friends. The outlawry of Richmond and Queens-counties and the terrible outrages which had been inflicted on their peaceful inhabitants, under the authority or with the permission of the earlier Provincial Congresses, had already produced their legitimate results, in the eagerness with which the persecuted and outraged inhabitants of each of these Counties had accepted the protection of the Royal Army and taken up arms for retaliatory action ; 2 and

nothing else than a continued and a more than ever before besotted haughtiness, utterly unmindful of the Rights of those who were assumed to be subject to their authority, and a continued and more than ever before mulish stubbornness, in their continued determination to reduce every one who opposed them, no matter how slightly, to an unconditional and absolute submission of thought, word, and deed, to their oligarchic authority, regardless of any and every consequence to others or to the country at large -- only such a haughtiness and such a stubbornness, indeed, as had characterized the Colonial policy and the administration of Lord Bute and Lord North and Lord George Germaine and their Tory associates, in England; the same as those which had controlled the three Congresses which had preceded it, after the members of the first of them had been induced to wander into the green pastures of the revolutionary faction -- could have induced the master-spirits of this new Provincial Congress, under the peculiar circumstances which had recently arisen, to disregard the significant teachings of their earlier policy, and to create disaffection and to raise up enemies when harmony and a concert of action, in the cause of their common country, had become so vitally necessary.