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the rights of our Roman Catholic fellow citizens, equally as if our own were at this moment attacked.
As the representatives in the Government, of the British Protestant element, I address you and Dr. Church and ask you to obtain from Mr. de Boucherville and your Roman Catholic Colleagues a public and explicit declaration that they reject and refuse to acknowledge the authority claimed for his church by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Montreal, in all matters pertaining to public law and the government of the country, and that religious belief shall never be made the ground for interference by the Roman Catholic majority, but that Catholic and Protestant, French Canadian and British shall ever be maintained in their equal and co-ordinate rights.
Without such a declaration for the re-assurance of our minds, and which will place your Government equally with your opponents on a footing of decided independence of the Church, I think you should not obtain the support of the Protestants of Lower Canada.
In my retirement from public life, I certainly thought that the party with whom I had so long acted in Quebec, and who had with me provided for the future security and independence of both Catholic and Protestant, French Canadian and British, in the Act of Confederation, would have been the last to assail those safeguards. But the lamented death of Sir George Cartier has left this party to fall under the baneful influence of foreign intrigue, and it may well be that I shall have once more to enter the arena of political strife, to protect those interests which I am so responsible for creating.
Meantime, I have the conviction that you will be able to avert the impending disruption of our former party alliances, and maintain the supremacy of law and of public opinion over the dictum of any one, be he priest or layman; or, failing this, that you will take the lead in withdrawing the support of British Protestants from the Government of Mr. de Boucherville.
