rwards drawing in the other provinces. The chief
justice preferred to make a constitution. The governor
preferred to let it grow. The home government's preference
could not be stated better than in Grenville's dispatch
to Carleton of the 20th of October 1789: 'The general
object is to assimilate the constitution to that of Great
Britain as nearly as the difference arising from the
manners of the People and from the present situation of
the Province will admit. ... Attention is due to the
prejudices and habits of the French Inhabitants and every
caution should be used to continue to them the enjoyment
of those civil and religious Rights which were secured
to them by the Capitulation or which have since been
granted by the liberal and enlightened spirit of the
British Government.' Except for its rather too
self-righteous conclusion this confidential announcement
really is an admirable statement of the 'liberal and
enlightened' views which prevailed at Westminster.

The bill, postponed in 1790, was introduced by Pitt
himself in the House of Commons on the 7th of March 1791.
Sixteen days later Adam Lymburner, a representative
merchant of Quebec, whom Carleton described as 'a quiet,
decent man, not unfriendly to the administration,' pleaded
for hours before the committee of the House of Commons
against the division of the province. All the
English-speaking minority in the prospective province of
Lower Canada were afraid of being swamped by the
French-Canadian vote, and so of being hampered in liberty
and trade. The London merchants naturally backed Lymburner.
Fox opposed the bill as not being liberal enough. Burke
flared up into the speech which led to his final breach
with Fox. Pitt, the pilot who was to weather far greater
storms in the years to come, eventually got the bill
through both Houses with substantial majorities. On the
14th of May it became law. Quebec and Ontario were parted
for good, notwithstanding the legislative union of fifty
years later.

The Canada Act, or, as it is better known, the
Constitutional Act, cut off Upper Canada. Lower Canada
was now the old Quebec reduced to its right size, endowed
with clarified laws and a brand-new parliament, and made
as acceptable as possible to the English-speaking minority
without any injustice to the vastly greater French
majority. Quebec, Three Rivers, Montreal, and Sorel got
each two members in the new parliament, an allotment
which ensured a certain repre