d by the house, before any
disapprobation of it was expressed. On the second consideration of the
report, however, Fox condemned its every principle. He observed, that
the object of all popular assemblies was that the people should be
fully and fairly represented, but as the assembly of one province was to
consist of sixteen, and the other of thirty, the people were deluded by
a mockery of representation. Fox also objected to the representatives
being elected for the term of seven years, and contended that there
should be annual, or at most triennial elections. Even in England, he
said, where the frequent return of elections was attended with great
inconvenience, the propriety of the septennial bill might justly be
doubted. Fox further objected, that the legislative councils were
unlimited as to numbers by any other restriction than the pleasure of
the king, to whom a power was reserved of annexing to certain honorary
and titular distinctions an hereditary right of sitting in council. As
to hereditary honours, he remarked, as a general proposition, it was
difficult to say whether they were good or not, but he saw no good
in their being introduced into a country where they had hitherto been
unknown. It might not be wise to destroy them where they existed, but it
was unwise to create them where they did not exist. He could not account
for this step, unless it was that Canada having formerly been a French
colony, there might be an opportunity of reviving those distinctions,
the loss of which some gentlemen so deplored, and to revive in the west
that spirit of chivalry which had fallen into so much disgrace in a
neighbouring country. In the course of his speech Fox made one unhappy
allusion to the extinction of nobility in France, and its forced revival
by us in Canada: "nobility," he said, "stunk in the nostrils of the
people of America." At this time, indeed, Fox and his party embraced
every opportunity of extolling the "glorious revolution" in France,
whence, on the re-commitment of the bill, Burke again sounded the
trumpet of alarm at that event. In enlarging upon the importance of
the act which they were now about to perform, he said, "The first
consideration was the competency of the house to such an act." "A body
of rights," he continued, "commonly called the Rights of Man, had been
lately imported from a neighbouring kingdom; the principle of which code
was, that all men were, by nature, free and equal in respect of t