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/69



Petition from the Home District of Upper Canada
We His Majesty's faithful subjects, the undersigned Gentlemen and Freeholders of the Home District of Upper Canada, most humbly beg leave to represent to your Honourable House, the serious alarm given us by the reports, through the medium of the public prints, of recent measures introduced to your Honourable House relative to the Government and Trade of the Canadas, and proposing, as one of those measures, a Union of the two Provinces; an alarm, excited not only by the reported terms whereupon this Union was to have been declared, but by the very mode of its introduction, so highly unconstitutional, as regards the liberty of the people of this Province, and so fatal to its interests and welfare, that we should be very deficient in our duty to ourselves, and the community of which we form so great a part, if we did not, without loss of time, make this our humble but earnest and just petition and remonstrance to your Honourable House against this measure, so rashly proposed for your adoption, and for reasons that cannot fail to awake your parental attention to this Colony; and

First, because the project, as announced to us by those public prints, if consummated, would have been to us the unmerited privation of our Constitution, as the same is defined by the Act of the British Parliament, passed in the Thirty-first year of his late Majesty's reign, entitled, "An Act for more effectual provision for the Government of the Province of Quebec, in North America, and to make further provision for the Government of the