The British cabinet, of which Mr. Pitt, the famous son of the Earl of Chatham, was first minister, now decided to divide the province of Quebec into two districts, with separate legislatures and governments. Lord Grenville, while in charge of the department of colonial affairs, wrote in 1789 to Lord Dorchester that the "general object of the plan is to assimilate the constitution of the province to that of Great Britain as nearly as the differences arising from the names of the people and from the present situation of the province will admit." He also emphatically expressed the opinion that "a considerable degree of attention is due to the prejudices and habits of the French inhabitants, and every degree of caution should be used to continue to them the enjoyment of those civil and religious rights which were secured to them by the capitulation of the province, or have since been granted by the liberal and enlightened spirit of the British government." When the bill for the formation of the two provinces of Upper Canada and Lower Canada came before the house of commons, Mr. Adam Lymburner, an influential merchant of Quebec, appeared at the Bar and ably opposed the separation "as dangerous in every point of view to British interests in America, and to the safety, tranquillity and prosperity of the inhabitants of the province of Quebec" He pressed the repeal of the Quebec act in its entirety and the enactment of a perfectly new constitution "unclogged and unembarrassed with any laws prior to this period" He professed to represent the views "of the most intelligent and respectable of the French Canadians"; but their antagonism was not directed against the Quebec act in itself, but against the administration of the law, influenced as this was by the opposition of the British people to the French civil code. Nor does it appear, as Mr. Lymburner asserted, that the western Loyalists were hostile to the formation of two distinct provinces. He represented simply the views of the English-speaking inhabitants of Lower Canada, who believed that the proposed division would place them in a very small minority in the legislature and, as the issue finally proved, at the mercy of the great majority of the French Canadian representatives, while on the other hand the formation of one large province extending from Gaspé to the head of the great lakes would ensure an English representation sufficiently formidable to lessen the danger of French Canadian domination. However, the British government seems to have been actuated by a sincere desire to do justice to the French Canadians and the Loyalists of the upper province at one and the same time. When introducing the bill in the house of commons on the 7th March, 1791, Mr. Pitt expressed the hope that "the division would remove the differences of opinion which had arisen between the old and new inhabitants, since each province would have the right of enacting laws