Thus repulsed at every point, the Dutch agents commenced their return. They bore a letter to Stuyvesant from the General Assembly, in which, withholding from him the title of governor of New Netherland, they discourteously addressed him simply as "Director General at Manhattan." As we have mentioned, there were many English settlers in the Dutch towns on the western end of Long Island. In some of them it is not improbable that the English element predominated. In the letter sent by the General Court to Governor Stuyvesant, it was stated that Westchester and Stamford belonged to Connecticut; that, for the present, the General Court would forbear from exercising any authority over the English plantations on Long Island; but that, should the Dutch molest the English there, the Connecticut authorities would use all just and lawful means for their protection. The situation of the Dutch province was now alarming in the extreme, and Governor Stuyvesant was environed by difficulties which no mortal sagacity or energy could surmount. His treasury was exhausted. The English settlers in the Long Island villages, were in determined and open revolt. And his English neighbors, whom he was altogether too feeble to resist, were crowding upon him in the most merciless encroachments. Under these circumstances, he called a Convention, to consist of two delegates from all the neighboring villages, to meet at New Amsterdam on the 22d of October, 1663. Eight towns were represented. The Convention adopted an earnest remonstrance to the authorities in Holland, in which the disastrous situation of the province was mainly attributed to their withholding that aid which was essential to the maintenance of the colony. "The people of Connecticut," the remonstrance stated, "are enforcing their unlimited patent according to their own interpretation, and the total loss of New Netherland is threatened. The English, to cloak their plans, now object that there is no proof, no legal commission or patent, from their High Mightinesses, to substantiate and justify our rights and claims to the property of this province, and insinuate that through the backwardness of their High Mightinesses to grant such a patent, you apparently intended to place the people here on slippery ice, giving them lands to which your honors had no right whatever." Governor Stuyvesant sent with this remonstrance a private letter to the home government, in which he urged that the boundary question should be settled by the national authorities of the two countries. "It is important," he said,