Page:Letter from L. J. Papineau and J. Neilson, Esqs., Addressed to His Majesty's Under Secretary of State on the Subject of the Proposed Union of the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada.djvu/20

 excess of injustice which might result from its provisions; but the possibility of such a result, can never justify such an enactment.

It is not, however, in respect to their property only that the inhabitants of Lower Canada have reason to be alarmed by the enactment of these clauses. By the capitulations of Canada; by the Treaty of Cession in 1763; by the acts of the 14th and 31st of Geo. III.; the inhabitants of Lower became entitled to property, civil laws, religious liberties and rights, in many respect different from, and in some instances at variance with, those that have prevailed or do prevail in the other British Colonies. The existing constitution ensures them the full enjoyment of all these, without alteration, unless the majority of the qualified electors throughout the Province should consent to change them, by Representatives chosen by themselves. The proposed Bill, by calling into the Legislature the representatives of a country accustomed to a different order of things, perhaps, prejudiced against that which prevails in Lower Canada, and by giving to that population, consisting of a fourth or fifth of their numbers, property and qualified Electors, a majority, or at least equality of votes, in the only branch of the Colonial Legislature, in which the people of Lower Canada have a direct share, puts all the property, laws, and peculiar privileges of the nature aforementioned, to great