In the absence of Lord Dorchester in England, the duty devolved on Major-General Alured Clarke, as lieutenant-governor, to bring the Lower Canadian constitution into force by a proclamation on the 18th February, 1791. On the 7th May, in the following year, the new province of Lower Canada was divided into fifty electoral districts, composed of twenty-one counties, the towns of Montreal and Quebec, and the boroughs of Three Rivers and William Henry (now Sorel). The elections to the assembly took place in June, and a legislative council of fifteen influential Canadians was appointed. The new legislature was convoked "for the despatch of business" on the 17th December, in the same year, in an old stone building known as the Bishop's Palace, which stood on a rocky eminence in the upper town of the old capital. Chief Justice Smith took the chair of the legislative council under appointment by the crown, and the assembly elected as its speaker Mr. Joseph Antome Panet, an eminent advocate, who was able to speak the two languages. In the house there were only sixteen members of British origin--and in later parliaments there was even a still smaller representation--while the council was nearly divided between the two nationalities. When the house proceeded to business, one of its first acts was to order that all motions, bills and other proceedings should be put in the two languages. We find in the list of French Canadian members of the two houses representatives of the most ancient and distinguished families of the province. A descendant of Pierre Boucher, governor of Three Rivers in 1653, and the author of a rare history of Canada, sat in the council of 1792 just as a Boucherville sits now-a-days in the senate of the Dominion. A Lotbinière had been king's councillor in 1680. A Chaussegros de Lery had been an engineer in the royal colonial corps; a Lanaudière had been an officer in the Carignan regiment in 1652; a Salaberry was a captain in the royal navy, and his family won further honours on the field of Chateauguay in the war of 1812-15, when the soil of Lower Canada was invaded. A Taschereau had been a royal councillor in 1732. The names of Belestre, Valtric, Bonne, Rouville, St. Ours, and Duchesnay, are often met in the annals of the French régime, and show the high character of the representation in the first parliament of Lower Canada.