colonies, from this time all hope of peace in America will be destroyed. The Americans will look on the Canadians as their task-masters, and, in the end, their executioners." It was urged by ministers that common justice demanded the adoption of such a measure, for a very large proportion of the people of Canada were Roman Catholics. ** Edmund Burke, Thomas Townshend, Charles Fox, Sergeant Glynn, and others joined Colonel Barré in his denunciations of the bill, particularly in relation to the clauses concerning the Roman Catholic religion, and that providing for the establishment of a Legislative Council to be appointed by the crown. The former were considered a dangerous precedent for a Protestant government, and the latter was regarded as shadowing forth the ultimate design of the king and his ministers to subvert the popular form of government in America, and to make the legislators mere creatures of the crown. By its provisions the Governor of Canada was vested with almost absolute and illimitable power, and permitted to be nearly as much a despot, if he chose, as any of the old Spanish viceroys of * Thomas and John Penn, son and grandson of William Penn, then the proprietaries of Pennsylvania and Delaware, entered a protest against the boundary section of this bill, because it contemplated an encroachment upon their territory. Burke, who was then the agent of the colony of New York, also opposed this section of the bill for the same reason, in behalf of his principal. The letter of that statesman to the Assembly of New York on the subject is published among the Collections of the New York Historical Society, and is said to be the only one known to be extant of all those which he wrote to that body. ** Governor Carleton asserted, on oath, before a committee of Parliament, that there were then only about three hundred and sixty Protestants in Canada, while the Roman Catholics numbered one hundred and fifty thousand. Passage of the "Canada Bill."--Effect of the Measure in the Colonies.-- Boldness of Orators and the Press. 157South America. On this point Lord Chatham (William Pitt) was particularly eloquent, and he also took ground against the religious features of the bill, as an innovation dangerous to the Protestant faith and to the stability of the throne. The bill, however, with all its exceptionable clauses, was adopted by quite a large majority in both Houses, and received the royal assent on the 22d of June. It was introduced into the House of Lords by the Earl of Dartmouth, and passed that House without opposition. This bill is refer red to in our Declaration of Independence as one of the "acts of pretended legislation" that justified the separation from the parent country.