It had been customary to let Quakers vote without taking the oath, for by their religion they were forbidden to “swear.” Instead they were allowed to “affirm.” That custom gave Cosby’s sheriff a loophole. He decreed that no one who would not take the oath should be allowed to cast a ballot, and so he ruled the Friends out of the election, hoping that this maneuver would change the result. In fact it did not, for even without this group of his supporters Morris won a resounding victory. The election was momentous beyond the fact that it returned to the Assembly a veteran of rough-and-tumble politics who was sure to throw his weight against the Governor wherever he could, and that it hardened the Quakers against the regime. It revealed Cosby as completely unscrupulous in dealing with his opponents, as a man who, occupying the position of chief upholder of the law, had no hesitation in playing fast and loose with it when he thought he could gain some advantage. Before the election he had been guilty of many questionable things, such as the legal attack on Van Dam and the removal of Lewis Morris from the Supreme Court, but these were at least debatable, with something to be said for him even if he could not be exculpated. Now his conduct was not debatable. It was plainly unethical, if not technically illegal. The Westchester election was, in more ways than one, a triumph for the Popular party, which had impelled Cosby into a crime that was at once manifest and useless, revealing him as stupid as well as criminal. The furor had hardly begun to die away before there burst upon the Governor the bombshell of an opposition newspaper. The _New York Weekly Journal_, edited by James Alexander and printed by Peter Zenger, was the first _political independent_ ever published on this continent. The men behind it created a journalistic category new to American experience when they deliberately decided to make a continuing open battle with Governor Cosby the rationale of their editorial policy. They published a specifically political newspaper, no arm of the authorities or toady to headquarters, but the mouthpiece of those who were challenging the representative of the king in their Colony. There was nothing hesitant or sporadic about their undertaking. The paper came out every Monday, always truculent and always propagandizing one point of view in politics. The political issue was the only _raison d’être_ of publication. Everything else—foreign news, essays, verses, squibs, advertisements—was filler. Here was something original for this side of the ocean, an experiment in journalism as critical as ever was attempted by any members of our fourth estate; and successful, for the _Journal_ lived and throve and became the ancestor of the great American political organs of modern times.