The terms of Grenville’s dispatch to Dorchester of the 20th October, 1789, in which he enclosed the draft of the proposed Act, and of the Private and Secret letter which he wrote at the same time, are interesting as showing the grounds on which Pitt’s Government had come to the decision to divide Canada into two provinces and to give popular institutions in either case.[200] Grenville wrote that the general object of the plan adopted by the Government was to assimilate the constitution of the province of Quebec 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’. In trying to effect this object it was necessary to pay attention to the ‘prejudices and habits of the French inhabitants’, and most carefully to safeguard the civil and religious rights which had been secured to them at or subsequently to the capitulation of the province. This consideration had largely influenced the Government in favour of dividing the province into two districts, still to remain under the administration of a Governor-General, but each to have a Lieutenant-Governor and separate Legislature. The Government, Grenville continued, had not overlooked the reasons urged by Lord Dorchester against a division of the province, and they felt that great weight would have been due to his suggestions, had it been intended to continue the existing form of administration and not to introduce representative institutions; but, the decision having been taken to establish a provincial legislature to be chosen in part by the people, ‘every consideration of policy seemed to render it desirable that the great preponderance possessed in the upper districts by the King’s ancient subjects, and in the lower by the French Canadians, should have their effect and operation in separate legislatures, rather than that these two bodies of people should be blended together in the first formation of the new constitution, and before sufficient time has been allowed for the removal of ancient prejudices by the habit of obedience to the same government and by the sense of a common interest’. Grenville’s private letter, which supplemented the public dispatch, showed that a lesson had been learnt from the late war with the American colonies. ‘I am persuaded,’ he wrote, ‘that it is a point of true policy to make these concessions at a time when they may be received as a matter of favour, and when it is in our own power to regulate and direct the manner of applying them, rather than to wait till they shall be extorted from us by a necessity which shall neither leave us any discretion in the form nor any merit in the substance of what we give.’[201] The last paragraph of the letter gave another reason for making the proposed changes without further delay, and that was that ‘the state of France is such as gives us little to fear from that quarter in the present moment. The