116 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



legislation without an Assembly and that all the Ordinances thereto- 

 fore made had been made without warrant or authority from the 

 Commission and therefore might perhaps be justly contended to be 

 null and void (6). This Report did not meet the approval of Carleton; 

 and there does not seem to be any solid ground for Masères' 

 doubts. 



The London Merchants pressed a claim for a full Legislature, 

 i.e., an Assembly and a Council; and in 1769 the Board of Trade took 

 the matter into consideration. They suggested as an experiment 

 and not as a fixed and permanent system, an Assembly of twenty- 

 seven Members who should not be required to subscribe the declara- 

 tion against Transubstantiation (except those elected for the two 

 Cities of Quebec and Montreal and the Town of Trois Rivières) but 

 only to take the oaths of Allegiance, Supremacy and Abjuration, there- 

 by allowing Roman Catholics to be elected for the rural constituencies. 

 It was expected by this means to assure nearly an equal number of 

 Protestant and Catholic Members in the popular house (7). Nothing 

 came of this scheme. 



From time to time petitions were sent to the Home Governments 

 by "Old Subjects" (i.e. those who did not become Subjects by the 

 Conquest and Treaty of 1763, these being the "New Subjects") 

 asking for an Assembly, claiming that there was a sufficient number 

 of Protestant Subjects in the Province qualified to be Members. 

 Occasionally but very rarely it was suggested that Roman Catholics 

 and French Canadians might be admitted to Parliament; generally the 

 monopoly of seats in Parliament was considered the right of Protestants. 

 Solicitor General Wedderburn, indeed, thought it would be a dangerous 

 experiment to admit a Canadian to a place in the Assembly but 

 thought also that it would be impossible to exclude Canadians from 

 voting — he was wholly opposed to an Assembly and thought that the 

 power to make Laws must be vested in a Governor and a Council con- 

 sisting of a certain number of persons not wholly dependent on the 

 Governor (8). 



The French Canadians did not much trouble themselves about 

 an Assembly; what they were desirous of, was to recover their old laws 

 of which they had been deprived by the Royal Proclamation of 

 October, 1763. 



But the incessant cry on the part of the "Old Subjects" (9) caused 

 the question of the form of Parliament to be taken up by the Home 

 Administration. "The Quebec Act" of 1774 was the result. The 

 Royal Instructions to the Governor who followed Murray contained 

 the same provisions as to calling a General Assembly as did the 



