pardon of the House, and paid the costs of the proceedings, in addition to all which they gave up the name of the author. He proved to be none other than the Rev. Hezekiah Watkins, a missionary to the County of Ulster, residing at Newburg. The reverend gentleman was accordingly arrested, brought to New York, and voted guilty of a high misdemeanor and contempt of the authority of the House. Of what persuasion was this Mr. Watkins does not appear. But neither Luther, nor Calvin, nor Hugh Latimer would have betrayed the right of free discussion as he did by begging the pardon of the House, standing to receive a reprimand, paying the fees, and promising to be more circumspect in future-for the purpose of obtaining his discharge. This case affords the most singular instance of the exercise of the doubtful power of punishing for what are called contempts on record. A court has unquestionably a right to protect itself from indignity while in session, and so has a legislative body, although the power of punishing for such an offense without trial by jury, is now gravely questioned. But for a legislative body to extend the mantle of its protection over its constituency in such a matter is an exercise of power of which, even in the annals of the Star Chamber, when presided over by Archbishop Laud, it is difficult to find a parallel. Sure it is that a people, then or now, who would elect such members to the Legislature deserve nothing else than contempt. From the establishment, however, of the independence of the country until the present day there has been no attempt to fetter the press by censors or by law, while the old English law of libel, which prevailed until the beginning of the present century, has been so modified as to allow the truth in all cases to be given in evidence. For the attainment of this great end the country is indebted, more than to all other men, to the early and bosom friend of the late venerable Dr. Nott-Alexander Hamilton.

At length the incessant quarrels of the weak and avaricious Cosby with the people and their representatives was suddenly terminated by his death in March, 1736. On his decease, Mr. George Clarke, long a member of the Council, after a brief struggle with Mr. Van Dam for the presidency, succeeded to the direction of the government, and, being shortly afterward commissioned as Lieutenant-Governor, continued at the head of the colonial administration from the autumn of 1736 to that of 1743. Mr. Clarke was remotely connected by marriage with the family of Lord Clarendon, having been sent over as Secretary of the colony in the reign of Queen Anne. Being, moreover, a man of strong common sense and of uncommon tact, and by reason of his long residence in the colony, and the several official stations he had held, well acquainted with its affairs, his administration-certainly, until toward its close-was comparatively popular, and, all circumstances considered, eminently successful. In the brief struggle for power between himself and Mr. Van Dam, the latter had been sustained by the popular party, while the

officers of the Crown and the partisans of Cosby, with few, if any exceptions, adhered to Mr. Clarke. This difficulty, however, had been speedily ended by a royal confirmation of the somewhat doubtful authority assumed by Mr. Clarke. His own course, moreover, on taking the seals of office, was conciliatory. In his first speech to the General Assembly, he referred in temperate language to the unhappy divisions. which had of late disturbed the colony, and which he thought it was then a favorable moment to heal. The English flour-market having been overstocked by large supplies furnished from the other colonies, the attention of the Assembly was directed to the expediency of encouraging domestic manufactures in various departments of industry. To the Indian affairs of the colony Mr. Clarke invited the special attention of the Assembly. The military works of Fort Hunter being in a dilapidated condition, and the object of affording protection to the Christian settlements through the Mohawk Valley having been accomplished, the Lieutenant-Governor suggested the erection of a new fort at the carrying-place between the Mohawk River and Wood Creek,* leading into Oneida Lake, and thence through the Oswego River into Lake Ontario; and the transfer of the garrison from Fort Hunter to this new and commanding position. He likewise recommended the repairing of the blockhouse at Oswego, and the sending of smiths and other artificers into the Indian country, especially among the Senecas.†

During the greater part of the year 1738-—if we except the establishing of a quarantine on Bedloe's Island and the opening of Rector street-but little attention was paid to local affairs-the principal historical incident of that year being the memorable contested election between

* The site, afterward, of Fort Stanwix, now the opulent town of Rome.

In the course of this session of the General Assembly, Chief Justice De Lancey, Speaker of the Legislative Council, announced that his duties in the Supreme Court would render it impossible for him to act as Speaker through the session. It was therefore ordered that the oldest Councillor present should thenceforward act as Speaker. Under this order, Dr. Cadwallader Colden first came to the chair.

On the twenty-sixth of October, the Council resolved that they would hold their sittings in the common council chamber of the City Hall. The House immediately returned a message that they were holding their sessions, and should continue to hold them, in that chamber; and that it was conformable to the constitution that the Council, in its legislative capacity, should sit as a distinct and separate body. During the same session, also, the Council having sent a message to the House by the hand of a deputy-clerk, a message was transmitted back, signifying that the House considered such a course disrespectful. Until that time messages had been conveyed between the Houses, with bills, resolutions, &c., by the hands of their members respectively. The House considered the sending of a clerk an innovation upon their privileges; and Colonel Phillipse, Mr. Verplank, and Mr. Johnson were appointed a committee to wait upon the Council and demand satisfaction. The Council healed the matter by a conciliatory resolution, declaring that no disrespect had been intended.

Adolphe Philipse and Gerret Van Horne, in connection with which, owing to the extraordinary skill and eloquence of Mr. Smith, father of the historian, and of counsel for Van Horne, the Hebrew freeholders of the City of New York, from which place both parties claimed to have been returned to the Assembly, were most unjustly disfranchised, on the ground of their religious creed, and their votes rejected. The colony was greatly excited by this question, and the persuasive powers exerted by Mr. Smith are represented to have been wonderful-equaling, probably, if not surpassing, those of Andrew Hamilton, four years previously, in the great libel case of Zenger-and possibly not excelled even by Patrick Henry a few years afterward, when he dethroned the reason of the court, and led captive the jury, in the great tobacco case in Virginia.

The years 1738 and 1739, were marked by increasing political excitement; and the dividing line of parties, involving the great principles of civil liberty on the one side and the prerogatives of the Crown on the other, were more distinctly drawn, perhaps, than at any antecedent period. The administrations of the earlier English Governors, Nicholls and Lovelace, were benevolent and almost parental. Andross, it is true, was a tyrant; and during his administration parties were formed, as in England, upon the mixed questions of politics and religion, which dethroned the last and most bigoted of the Stuarts, and brought William and Mary upon the throne. Dongan, however, the last of the Stuart Governors in New York, although a Roman Catholic, was nevertheless mild in the administration of the government, and a gentleman in his feelings and manners. It was upon his arrival in the autumn of 1683, that the freeholders of the colony, as we have seen, were invested with the right of choosing representatives to meet the Governor in General Assembly. For nearly twenty years subsequent to the revolution of 1689, the colony was torn by personal, rather than political factions, having their origin in the controversy which compassed the judicial murder of the unhappy Leisler and his son-in-law, Milburne. These factions dying out in the lapse of years, other questions arose, the principal of which was that important one which always, sooner or later, springs up in every English colony-involving, on the one hand, as I have already remarked, the rights of the people, and on the other the claims of the Crown. Invariably, almost, if not quite, the struggle is originated upon some question of revenue-either in the levying thereof, or in its disposition, or both. Thus in the origin of those political parties in New York, which continued with greater or less acrimony until the separation from the parent country, Sloughter and Fletcher had both endeavored to obtain grants of revenue to the Crown for life, but had failed. Subsequently grants had been occasionally made to the officers of the Crown for a term of years; but latterly, especially during the administration of Governor Cosby, the General Assembly had grown more

refractory upon the subject-pertinaciously insisting that they would vote the salaries for the officers of the Crown only with the annual supplies. This was a principle which the Governors, as the representatives of the Crown, felt bound to resist, as being an infringement of the royal prerog. ative. Henceforward, therefore, until the colony cast off its allegiance, the struggle in regard to the revenue and its disposition, was almost perpetually before the people, in one form or another; and in some years, owing to the obstinacy of the representatives of the Crown on one side, and the inflexibility of the representatives of the people on the other, supplies were not granted at all. Mr. Clarke, although he had the address to throw off, or to evade, the difficulty, for the space of two years, was nevertheless doomed soon to encounter it. Accordingly, in his speech to the Assembly at the autumnal session of 1738, he complained that another year had elapsed without any provision being made for the support of his Majesty's government in the province the neglect having occurred by reason of "a practice not warranted by the usage of any former General Assemblies." He therefore insisted strongly upon the adoption of measures for the payment of salaries; for the payment of public creditors; and for the general security of the public credit by the creation of a sinking-fund for the redemption of the bills of the colony.

The Assembly was refractory. Instead of complying with the demands of the Lieutenant-Governor, the House resolved unanimously that they would grant no supplies upon that principle; and in regard to a sinking fund for the redemption of the bills of credit afloat, they refused any other measure than a continuance of the existing excise. These spirited and peremptory resolutions gave high offense to the representative of the Crown; and on the day following their adoption, the Assembly was summoned to the fort, and dissolved by a speech, declaring the said resolutions "to be such presumptuous, daring, and unprecedented steps that he could not look upon them but with astonishment, nor could he with honor suffer their authors to sit any longer."

The temper of the new Assembly, summoned in the spring of the succeeding year, 1739, was no more in unison with the desires of the Lieutenant-Governor than that of the former. The demand for a permanent supply-bill was urged at several successive sessions, only to be met with obstinate refusals. The second session, held in the autumn, was interrupted in October, by a prorogation of several days, for the express purpose of affording the members leisure "to reflect seriously" upon the line of duty required of them by the exigencies of the country; for, not only was the Assembly resolutely persisting in the determination to make only annual grants of supplies, but they were preparing to trench yet further upon the royal prerogative, by insisting upon specific applications of the revenue, to be inserted in the bill itself. Meantime, on the 13th of October, the Lieutenant-Govenor brought the subject of his

differences with the Assembly formally before his privy council. In regard to the new popular movement of this Assembly, insisting upon a particular application of the revenues to be granted in the body of the act for the support of the government, the Lieutenant-Govenor said they had been moved to that determination by the example of New Jersey, where an act of that nature had lately been passed. He was unwilling to allow any encroachment upon the rights of the Crown. Yet, in consideration of the defenseless situation of the colony, he felt uneasy at such a turn of affairs, and not being disposed to revive old animosities, or to create new ones by another summary dissolution, he asked the advice of the council. The subject was referred to a committee, of which the Hon. Daniel Horsmanden, an old member of the council, was chairman. This gentleman was one of the most sturdy supporters of the royal prerogative; but, in consequence of the existing posture of affairs, and the necessity of a speedy provision for the public safety, the committee reported unanimously against a dissolution. They believed, also, that the Assembly, and the people whom they represented, had the disputed point so much at heart that it would be impossible to do business with them unless it was conceded; and besides, it was argued, should a dissolution take place, there was no reason for supposing that the next Assembly would be less tenacious in asserting the offensive principle. Since, moreover, the Governor of New Jersey had yielded the point, the committee advised the same course in New York.* The point was conceded; and the effect, for the moment, was to produce a better state of feeling in the Assembly. Supplies were granted, but only for the year; and various appropriations were made for placing the city and colony in a posture of defense.

But it is seldom that the wheels of revolution roll backward, and the concession which allowed the General Assembly to prescribe the application or disposition of the supplies they voted, ever before claimed as the legal and known prerogative of the Crown, appeased the popular party only for a very short time. Indeed, nothing is more certain, whether in monarchies or republics, than that the governed are never

*See the old minutes of the executive or privy council, in manuscript, in the Secretary of State's office in Albany. To avoid confusion hereafter, it may be well to state in this connection, that the Council acted in a two-fold capacity: first, as advisary; second, as legislative. "In the first," says Smith, in his chapter, entitled Political State, "they are a privy council to the Governor." When thus acting they are often called the executive or majesty's council. Hence, privy council and executive council are synonymous. During the session of the legislature, however, the same council sat (without the presence of the Governor) as a legislative council; and in such capacity exercised the same functions as the Senate of the present day—so far as regards the passing of laws. The journals of this last or legislative council have recently been published by the State of New York under admirable editorship and the supervision of Dr. E. B. O'Callaghan.