trade should take place in the harbours of the United States or in the River St. Lawrence.
Lastly, That the repeal of these laws would have a tendency to perpetuate, and not to destroy, the relations existing between Canada and the mother-country.
West Indians for Free-trade as well as Canadians. For these reasons, an organisation of merchants in Montreal, and in various towns in Canada, who had leagued themselves as Free-traders and had been very active in disseminating their views, as well as in enforcing them, with all the influence they could command, on the colonial Governor, and on the English Executive and both Houses of Parliament, now demanded the total repeal of the British Navigation Laws. They did not, however, stand alone in their desire for unrestricted navigation. The West Indies, as soon as they found that the British Parliament had taken away the protection afforded to them by the differential duties, were as loud in their complaints as the Canadians, the more so, as having been deprived of all protection on their sugars by Lord John Russell's Equalization Act of 1847, it became indispensable to get their produce conveyed to market at the cheapest possible rate of freight, so as to compete, with any chance of success, with their foreign rivals. They therefore denounced the Navigation Laws in no measured terms; and when Montreal petitioned that its corn should be admitted into the ports of Great Britain in ships of any nation their merchants thought proper to charter, the West Indians preferred the same request, in order to secure the lowest cost of transport for their sugar. While, therefore, the colonists were urging the adoption of the
