important measures have been amongst those thus kept back for the end of the session. Yet the loss of such is sedulously charged to the account of the Council, in the ample list issued by those gentlemen in the Lower Chamber, who, though they could not part with their bills till the last, then always sent them up incomplete. Whatever the faults in the composition of the Council formerly, the Author believes that the additions subsequent to 1828 were made in good faith, and that Lord Gosford's further appointments, recently made, still further invest the Council with that character of independence and liberality which must be understood to be the main point desired. In the Quebec Sheet Almanack for this year there appear the names of forty legislative councillors. Of the active and prominent men amongst them, the number who have been known throughout their lives as the friends of popular rights (but not the advocates of rebellion) amounts to five; the number of leading persons on the other side may be stated to be the same. Again, the total number of men considered of liberal politics fully equals one half of the Council, with this distinction, that most of them are more lately appointed, and comparatively young men; while several of the others, from infirmity or other causes, never attend, and must in the course of nature shortly fall off the list. The number of French-Canadian members and of EnglishCanadian members is exactly equal. Here again, however, the same remark as to difference of age,

and the shorter tenure likely in one class, is applicable to the councillors of English extraction. The proportions of members who hold offices to those who do not, is 8 to 32. The Committee of 1828, it will be remembered, thought it enough to advise that the office-holders should not constitute a majority.

The diminishing space before him warns the Author to be brief. One of the favourite topics with those who have not taken the pains to inform themselves on the special facts of the dispute in Canada, is an attempt to draw a parallel with the dispute which led to the separation of the present United States. Now, independently of the dif ference between imposing a new tax, and merely applying money, which having actually accrued in the chest, was lying there due to the public servants, who had long since legitimately earned it, independently of the difference between, in the one case, attempting to raise a direct tax of a peculiarly annoying nature, and in the other only appropriating to the common ends of civil administration money that had flowed into the Government coffers in the silent and imperceptible course of trade, without inconvenience to any one,-independently of these distinctions, which, whether or not they affect the principle of the question, are at any rate extremely important as regards the amount of provocation offered (and what point can be more material in a rebellion than the extent of the provocation?), there remains this re

markable and decisive ground of discrimination between the two cases,- that in the one the money was claimed for the use of the Mother-Country, and the power of raising it for that object asserted as a permanent right to be constantly exercised; that in the other the money has been applied only to the most indispensable colonial purposes, and the power of application not been resorted to, except as a last expedient, in a quarrel which the adverse party choose to render desperate. It was not, as Lord John Russell very happily expressed it, a measure of Finance, but a measure of Defence.

That it was nevertheless a measure of defence which the Mother-Country was fully entitled by the law and Constitution to adopt, the Author has not the smallest doubt. To form one empire, there must be somewhere or other one supreme power. In the British Empire that power resides in the Parliament. Now this Parliament had bestowed on the British subjects in Canada a Constitution which, so long as the different bodies that it created were willing to abide by it, they were allowed freely and fully to exercise; but when one of these bodies declared that unless another co-ordinate authority erected at the same time with itself, and by the same act, were destroyed, it would never more discharge its own functions, this recusant body renounced the benefit of the form of Legislature hitherto enjoyed by the Provinces: it is not merely admitted, but is absolutely insisted that this Con

stitution was to work no longer; and to say, after this, that it was the Government of Great Britain which overthrew the Assembly of Canada, -to ask as if it were a parallel question, "What "would the English people do if Ministers were "to take measures to prevent the necessity of "assembling Parliament?" is a manner of putting facts quite peculiar to the curious publication in which it appears."

Take the analogous case of a Municipality created by Act of Parliament. Suppose that the new-born authorities should not be pleased with the nature or distribution of the privileges conferred upon them -that they should say they did not like the way of choosing their Mayor, or that they thought the manner of filling the vacancies in their Council might be improved and suppose they should further announce that until their views on these subjects were satisfied, they would no more attend to the police and repair of the town, does any one doubt what would be the rights of Parliament? Can it be supposed that Parliament would have no choice but to let itself be forced by this step to confer upon them a new Constitution which it might have reason to think pernicious? No, we all know what Parliament would do. It would not yield; but neither would it let the public suffer by the Corporation's contumacy. It would light and pave their town for them.

The Legislative Assembly of a large and popu

* The Canadian Portfolio, by Mr. Roebuck and others.

lous colony is, no doubt, a far more important institution, and one which it is very desirable should have a due sense of its own dignity, and resemblance to the honourable body at home of which it is a copy; but still if it pushes matters to such extremities as the Assembly of Lower Canada, the same argument will apply which is stated in the preceding paragraph, and for the same reason, namely, that such conduct must bring out the essential distinction between a subordinate and a supreme Legislature.

Remark also that it is not true that the course adopted towards Lower Canada, is as if the power of the House of Commons to refuse its votes of money were disputed. So long as the Assembly kept to objects within the Constitution, although it far exceeded the practice, yet, not going beyond the docrines known in the Mother-Country, its refusals of the necessary appropriations for the public service were not resisted. The advance from the Military Chest in 1834 was made with the hope that they would repay it, but their right to withhold their own funds was not denied. But if the House of Commons itself were to stop the supplies for such a purpose as the more recent stoppages of them in Lower Canada, and were to express a similar determination never to relax until a co-ordinate branch of the same Legislature were destroyed, no one would be at a loss to understand what was meant. It would be no fine-drawn question about Constitutional rights. "To your