Page:Address of the Hon. L.J. Papineau to the electors of the West Ward of Montreal.djvu/8



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Be pleased to accept my most sincere thanks for the confidence with which you have continued to honor me by re-electing me for the eighth time to represent you in Parliament. This solemn approbation of my past Parliamentary conduct is a solemn condemnation which you, in common with nineteen-twentieths of the people through the whole extent of the Province, have pronounced against an administration corrupt in its head and in all its members.

The man who was commissioned by his Sovereign to be the father of all the people has preferred to be the chief of a party—the soul of that fractionfaction [sic], of that faction which has elected that rickety minority, ridiculously styled "His Majesty's opposition in Parliament." The consequence has been that his ample authority and pompous titles, remain well written upon ''parchment. But they are null in the hearts of all honest men.'' He and his creatures have been scouted from every hustings by that party which, in the perspicacity of his powerful genius,, the clear sighted, saw, "sunk to that level of insignificance from which a combination of fortuitous circumstances raised them for a time, and to which they are rapidly descending."

Does my Lord now comprehend that Governors pass away, and that rapidly, in Canada, the moment they attract to themselves the contempt of the People?

The Election which you have made, considered in connexion with those simultaneously made in both the Canadas, is a solemn condemnation pronounced by a million of men upon political Institutions which oppress them—upon guilty men whom those Institutions have for too long a time clothed with irresponsible power, which they have so scandalously abused in every department of the state. Those Elections prove that the people are as much disgusted today with the present Constitution, as they were in 1774, with that of 1763, and in 1792 with that of 1774. It has, therefore, ceased to exist de jure. It cannot, therefore, be any longer preserved de facto, except by force and violence employed in oppressing the many for the benefit a few hirelings, who administer it for their own profit, and who, for the good of the Metropolitan State and of the Colony, cannot be too soon driven from public life, inasmuch as they are too corrupt to be reformed, and too rotten and too gangrenous to be healed. Their touch is contagious—no honest man ought to act with them, or associate with them, and thereby grant to their calamitous administration a few days' longer existence.

These Elections made under the circumstances which preceded them, impose upon the Representatives electelected [sic], the obligation of working with redoubled zeal in prosecuting to punishment the guilty who were accused in the last Session of Parliament—in reforming abuses—in effecting an alteration of a vicious Constitution—and in extending the Elective principle, the only refuge from the murderous lead of their assassins, and from the more revolting partialities of the Courts of Justice, which remains for a persecuted people who have been put beyond the protection of the Law ever since that mournful day—the bloody 21st May 1832. This mission I accept with all my heart. To the accomplishment of this trust I devote all the moments of my life.

Next to the satisfaction of having united the suffrages of so great a number of my fellow Citizens, whose zeal in the midst of the most violent outrages was supported only by their conscientious conviction that the Candidates whom they supported were devoted to the interests of Canada, the most lively satisfaction that I could have experienced was to be the object of an opposition so immoral and extravagant as that which was excited against me. The minority of a part of Montreal esteeming itself of superior importance in the country, imagined that a victory which would have given it two Representatives in a House so independent as that of the 15th Provincial Parliament, would have drawn it from that perfect impotence in which it is placed by its foolish opposition to the rest of the population of the Province. It thereby exposed the silly pride, the sanguinary