Page:Address of the Hon. L.J. Papineau to the electors of the West Ward of Montreal.djvu/12

 are, ten times more severe than the aggression. The Liberal party were so sure of the result of the Election that it could still oppose three good votes to each good vote remaining with its adversaries. To increase their little list of voters which remained, the latter inscribed thereon the names of men who refused them and sent them away ten times over, and who indignant at the continually increasing risks to which they exposed the lives and properties of citizens, adopted the determination to hasten to register their votes against them, and immediately to place them in a greater minority than that which already made their noble British blood boil with indignation, and which made us burst with laughter at the sight of their grotesque contortions.

The Liberal party could not wish for violence. It is convinced, it has declared with, and in a similar manner to, the Assembly, that the King's Representative was guilty of partiality and injustice in the exercise of the duties of his office—that his Majesty's Officers, as well Civil as Military, were for the major part combined as a faction, induced by interest alone, to struggle for the support of a corrupt Government, inimical to the rights, and opposed to the views of the people—it is convinced that Magisterial butchers have coolly and deliberately prepared traps in which three of our fellow citizens have been shot—it knows that the Governor has made himself their accomplice, by lavishing upon them his humble thanks—by erasing from the commission of the peace the names of whose hands are not stained with Canadian blood—by enjoining the Solicitor General to change the direction of the Court of Justice by a partial intervention in the Coroners proceedings—thus rendering the criminal injunction of an ignorant and despotic Soldier a rule of conduct for ignorant, slavish, or partizan Officers of Justice who have forced the law to be silent in obedience to the fist of their master. The Liberal party is persuaded that there has been only a pretended and simulated trial, conducted after concerted plans previously agreed upon, by an accuser who proclaimed the innocence of the accused, and promised them full and entire impunity—It is not ignorant that the King by his Coronation Oath, promised equal justice to all his subjects—that his Attorney General cannot, because he may be the relative or the friend of the murderers or bribed to save them, violate the conscience of his Sovereign, without rule, without formality, without written proceedings, and say to the Judges sufficiently ignorant and iniquitous to submit to him—"I interdict you from the exercise of your functions. I will not that you should listen to accusations brought against the murderers who are my friends or who have bribed me"—It knows that Canada is the only country which has ever afforded the exhibition of British Judges so completely abject as to be heard to say to the Counsel speaking on behalf of private individuals wishing to prosecute the accusation for the murder of their husband—their father or their child—"We would wish to hear you, but the Solicitor General is not willing"—and where this Solicitor would shortly after be promoted to the Office of Attorney General for having had the merit of gagging the Judges and the Lawyers of the private party, and rendering vain and illusory the Oath sworn by his King never to refuse nor to retard justice to any of his subjects.

The Liberal party has been the Counsel for the accused in the cause promoted to the Bench upon the recommendation of these very Judges whom he had contributed to gag and degrade. This, of all possible selections, was the most worthy of Lord Aylmer, because of all possible selections, it was the most insulting to Canada, and the most iniquitous, it being that of a fanatic political partizan, engaged all his life, in plots to overthrow the present system of laws. It knows that the Jury law, well understood and well executed by the Sheriffs of Quebec and Three Rivers, has been outrageously violated by the Sheriff of Montreal because it was necessary, at all hazards, to save those against whom they entered a pretended prosecution—a prosecution by which life was at stake if it were serious, and which concluded by compliments because it was a farce.

It has no doubt but that prevaricating Judges can, without having seen the depositions, decide of themselves to set at liberty without bail, persons who have been legally arrested upon the warrant of a Justice of the Peace, for —that Judges violently prejudiced can of themselves falsely assert that the Magistrate who issued his warrant to arrest the accused & bring them before him was liable to a fine of—500 Pounds.—It is persuaded that the greatest offences of the self-styled loyal and British party, are protected under the magic of those talismanic names by the sympathies of power and by the prostration of all the public functionaries at the feet of that party—on the contrary that owing to the antipathies of public functionaries the slightest peccadilloes of the liberal party are spied out and punished, with the most malignant joy, and the most vindictive severity—it knows that the divine laws which say that "whosoever shall spill man's blood by man shall his blood be spilt" are mute in Canada before the words 'British,' 'Loyalty,' 'Support of Government'—words coming from Hell, if they are to bear the meaning too frequently given them by party spirit. It knows that, in politics, blood demands blood in order that its effusion may be stopped, and that if impunity and rewards had not been dealt out and distributed among the murderers of ,