my pen was dedicated to the work of public instruction, down to 1837; when I went into the Assembly, to aid in those combined legislative movements for which the country was now prepared, and which, if made in good faith, the people were ready to sustain.

Up to this period, you will perceive, the Tories of Nova Scotia had ruled this country, according to their own good-will and pleasure and for their own advantage. How they had ruled, and how they were ruling it, you have probably not forgotten. Let me turn your attention to the state of the Province in 1837, just ten years ago, when the two parties which now claim your suffrages, began steadily to confront each other :

1. The members of the Legislative Council, holding their seats for life, formed a permanent Executive Council, controlling every Governor, and treating the people and their representatives with contempt.

ple.

2. The doors of the Legislative Council were closed against the peo

3. Public departments, and offices, were held by irresponsible incumbents, and transmitted from father to son.

4. No representative of a town or county sat in the Executive; the people, therefore, possessed no power to remove an obnoxious adviser of the Crown, by refusing to elect him.

5. The Representative branch possessed no power to influence the Executive by remonstrance, or to get rid of a bad administration by a vote of want of confidence.

6. We had ten Judges, paid out of our revenues, who performed, on an average, but a few weeks' work in the year.

7. Some of those Judges exacted from suitors about £1000 of fees per annum, for which there was no law.

8. The Chief Justice sat in the Legislative and Executive Councils, and mixed in all the fiery conflicts of politics.

9. There was no Quadrennial Bill, and a House once elected, sat for seven years, if sufficiently pliant and corrupt to suit the taste of the Executive.

10. There was no bill for vacating seats, on the acceptance of office and any representative of the people might sell himself to the government, without incurring the slightest responsibility.

11. The public lands of the Province were appropriated by the Crawley and Morris families, and scarcely yielded a sixpence to the treasury. 12. The casual and territorial revenues were divided by the officials among themselves, without any check or control.

13. The custom-house salaries were enormously high; and the privilege of free trade was confined to two or three ports.

14. Of twelve members of the Executive and Legislative Councils, but two had ever represented a township or county in Nova Scotia. 15. Of the twelve, all lived in the town of Halifax but one.

16. Of the twelve, nine were churchmen, and but three dissenters. 17. The main roads still went over the Horton and over the Cumberland mountains; there was no Guysborough road, no shore roads east or west of the capital; but few, worthy of the name, in Cape Breton; and, though £30,000 of revenue had been thrown away in a squabble between the two branches, and a much larger sum flung into the Shubenacadie Canal, no man having act or part in these follies had ever been called

to account.

Now, my fellow-countrymen, when you are told - —as you have been

frequently, and as you will be a thousand times during the approaching canvas, by the agents that the Tories are sending over the country — that Nova Scotia has been, is, or is to be, ruined by Howe and the liberals; bear in mind that this is the state in which Howe and the liberals found this Province, when I entered the Legislature in 1837.

In what state did we find its capital? Its condition, prior to 1835, may be seen in the six hours' exposition of its corruptions and abuses, which I was compelled to make, in that year, before the Supreme Court. This showing up lead to some improvements, but to no fundamental change. Halifax possessed no vestige of municipal privileges, no right of election to office, no efficient accountability; in fact, no responsible government.

This, my friends, is a faithful picture of your country and of its institutions, as the liberals found them in 1837. To sweep away such a mass of absurdity to cleanse such an Augean stable, was no easy task. The Tories tell us now, that they are great reformers and great patriots. What were they about from 1837 to 1840? Which of them raised his hand, or his voice, against this miserable system of irresponsibility, folly, and corruption? I ask you, my countrymen, if, in all the arduous labor which the liberals encountered in dealing with these questions, they ever had the cordial support of the Tories, as a Party? whether, as a party, however individuals may have occasionally voted on particular measures, we had not, at every step, their uncomprising opposition?

You are now asked by the gentlemen who assembled at the Harmonic Hall the other day, to return a Parliamentary majority to put down the liberals. I was not at the meeting, of course, but I know the materials of which it was composed, and the animus which guided its deliberations.

I should like to see ten men selected from it, of any mark, who ever gave voluntary aid in clearing away this mass of rubbish, with which the Liberals resolutely grappled in 1837. Where were the six members of the Executive Council, for whose advantage you are now asked to vote down the liberals, that they may be maintained in their positions?

Where was Sir Rupert George? Receiving his £1,800 a year (in ten years, since this contest commenced, he has pocketed £18,000) - for what? Has he proposed one measure of reform, written one article, or made one speech, to instruct the people, to advance a principle, or to carry a measure? What has he done, then? Left the liberals to do their work; while his wealth, his social and political influence, have been employed to obstruct them. These advantages, combined with a daily intercourse with every Governor, have made him the soul of that confederacy by whom your rights have been endangered, and by whose electioneering arts it is now vainly hoped that you are to be again cajoled.

[Similar questions, having reference to other members, were put and answered, but we omit them, as the letter is long enough without.]

But, last though not least of the six, where, let me ask of you, was the Attorney General in 1837, when all the work, which I have enumerated in these seventeen numbered paragraphs, was still to do, and when the liberals of Nova Scotia were bracing themselves for the labors which they have happily achieved? I saw him first, surrounded by all the Tories of Halifax, laboring with all his might to defeat Bell and Forrester's election; I saw him next in the Legislative Council, a staunch supporter of an administration in which sat eight churchmen and four dissenters, a determined opponent of responsible government. Again, I saw him voting to send Mr. Stewart and Mr. Wilkins to England, to oppose Mr. Young and Mr. Huntington, charged with an important mission by the people's representatives. In the winter of 1839, I saw him defeating the Civil List Bill, and giving, as a reason, that salaries higher than he ventured to ask in 1844 — were not high enough; and, in the spring of that year, I saw him at Mason's Hall, surrounded by all the Tories of Halifax, to defend Sir Colin Campbell for ruling for years with a parliamentary minority, and to denounce the House of Assembly, which had the manly firmness to pave the way for the new Constitution, by requesting his recall.

Yet these are the men that the Tories of Halifax have again met in solemn conclave to ask you to sustain. The patriots, who have so many claims to your confidence whose past services have earned for them, from the people of Nova Scotia, such a debt of gratitude. These

are the worthies, for whom the liberals are to be trampled under footfor whom the Speaker, Huntington, Doyle, McNab, Desbarres, McLellan, and their associates (the men who have done the work of this country for ten years, and who deserve the highest rewards that a free people can bestow) are to be thrust aside. Oh! no, my countrymen, I will not believe it of you. Blind, and infatuated, and servile, you would be indeed, to follow such counsels, and make such a selection. The farmer who would sow day nettles among his wheat - the merchant who would ship pirates in his bark—the mother who would entrust her children to the wolves, would not err more strangely, than would the Electtors of Nova Scotia, if they committed such a blunder.

I had hoped, fellow countrymen, that this letter, would have contained all I had to say to you, but it has grown under my hands, and I must reserve for another, a brief sketch of the manner in which the liberals dealt with the Augean stable — of the mode in which it was cleansed, and purified, with great advantage to you, and no thanks to the Tories. In the meantime do me the favor to keep this letter, that you may read the two in connection, fixing your attention upon the numbered paragraphs, which furnish a picture of your country as it appeared, when I first took my place beside those true friends to civil and religious liberty, who deserve your support as surely, as they will ever command the esteem of

SIR, By the Europa, and by the overland mails, we have received, in Nova Scotia, accounts more or less authentic, of the singular proceedings of the political party of which you are a conspicuous member. We have read the address published by a society of which you are the recognized head; and have before us various reports of the riots and incendiarism by which the city of Montreal was subsequently disgraced.

There may be no connection between the Hon. George Moffatt, and the coarse imitator of Cromwell who usurped the Speaker's chair; the

gentlemen who form the British American League may have no sympathy with the incendiaries who fired the Parliament House, and pelted the Governor General; and, if so, I may be taking an unwarrantable liberty in addressing this letter to you; but if leaders, in Canada, as everywhere else, are to be held responsible for the acts of those whose passions they inflame, and whose movements they might control, you will readily pardon the writer for not giving you the benefit of distinctions that it is difficult at this distance to perceive.

It appears, sir, that, on the 20th of April, the British American League, of which you are the president, commenced an organized opposition to the constituted authorities of Canada; and that on the 25th, only five days after, the Queen's Representative was assaulted in the streets of Montreal; the members of the House of Assembly were driven by violence from the hall of legislation; and the Parliament House, containing the finest library in North America and the public records of the Province, was reduced to ashes by a lawless and infuriated mob.

There may, as I have said, be no necessary connection between the North American League — who are dissatisfied with every thing and the Montreal incendiaries, who appear to have stuck at nothing; but, as yet advised, they seem to share a common sentiment, and to be working out a common policy. If they are not, the people in the Lower Provinces will be glad to be informed; but, in the meantime, we must beg leave to give both, the benefit of a few observations upon their joint proceedings.

We gather, from the "scholastic production" to which your name is attached, that a convention, called by yourself, is to supersede the Parliament of Canada. This movement for dispensing with the services of the Legislature, it seems to us Nova Scotians, very naturally generated the idea that the building in which it sat was an incumbrance; and that its books and papers, fraught with occult sciences and varied superstition, were dangerous to the progress of society. Lord Elgin, who stood in the way of Mr. Protector Moffatt, was pelted, as a matter of course; and, as the old Parliament House was too small to hold the convention, it was very reasonable that the mob should exclaim: "Burn it down, burn it down; why cumbereth it the ground?" The promulgation of your manifesto, and the occurrence of subsequent events, take us somewhat by surprise in this benighted Province; but nothing appears more natural than the sequence.

As you have appealed to North Americans in your address, and as the mob of Montreal have favored us with their interpretations of its contents, I am induced to inquire whether it be the true one; and whether