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[[Image:Robert-baldwin.jpg|thumb|left|Robert Baldwin, lawyer, parliamentarian and minister from Lower Canada]][[Image:Louis-hippolyte-la-fontaine.jpg|thumb|Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine, lawyer, parliamentarian and minister from Lower Canada]] | [[Image:Robert-baldwin.jpg|thumb|left|Robert Baldwin, lawyer, parliamentarian and minister from Lower Canada]][[Image:Louis-hippolyte-la-fontaine.jpg|thumb|Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine, lawyer, parliamentarian and minister from Lower Canada]]My formula is to give a cordial support to all measures that will seem good to me; and give a free censure with refusal to support those measures which will seem bad to me. With the antecedents that I have given myself and with those which other gave me, I do not have strong motives to court, in Montreal, the unfair inventors and easily fooled by this stratagem. Those who sold and those who printed these lies against me knew that they lied. They had their reasons to do it. Whether they collect or do not collect the honours and the profits which systematized trickery and falseness deserve, that is their business and their stuy; not mine.</blockquote> | ||
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Remote and dispersed as you are, it is no your efforts that can tear off the hands of your tyrants, neither the thunder by which they devastate and sterilize your fatherland, nor the lead sceptre under which they crush it. It is less for your fatherland than for yourselves; less for its happiness that for your honour, that you should not give up, disband, and dissolve your association on the perilous day of the upcoming dangers or the next chances of salute which shine on your country. Throughout Christendom, from religious Rome to philosophical Paris, autocratic Russia to the democratic United States, rises a universal cry of love and pity for Ireland, wrapped in its shroud of plague and famine, woven and sewn around it by aristocratic hands. Montreal alone, [astounded] by I do not know what juggler, will not be able, in the middle of the sheds devoted to the death which England pours from its European Ireland onto its American Ireland, to find a word of sympathy for pains and sufferings such as [[Wikipedia:Book of Lamentations|lamentations of Jeremiah]] alone can let us foresee the horror! Shame on the men who can be demoralizing enough to want for Montreal to be as lethargic as they are apathetic!</blockquote> | |||
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It is only a few weeks ago that you were organized, bribed and armed to meet, head to head, other organized, bribed and armed men. Those which enrolled you were less faulty than those against whom they pushed you. You, resident voters, were armed for the defence of your rights. Tories, seeking sicaires outside the limits of the county, armed for the illegal invasion of your rights. They were placing you in position of legitimate self-defence. Nevertheless, the ball and the sword are blind instruments which could as well reach your innocent chests as the culprit chests of your adversaries. The courts of justice are a closed field, where the fight begins in the middle of a night as dark as the [[Wikipedia:Erebus|Erebus]], of a labyrinth of turns and stratagems where justice is sometimes mislaid; where the skilful lawyer wins bad causes. You faced the dangers of the battle field, and the greater dangers of the lair of squabbles.</blockquote> | |||
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You thus have some right to the services and those which you carried on the bulwark, of those that you made great, putting your lives in peril. Go toward your representatives. You have the right to ask, to those who seek you before the elections, that they hear you after the elections; that they guide you and help you in your efforts, if they are useful and honourable to you; let them persuade you to discontinue them, if they prove you that they are harmful to the public interest, and, consequently, not very honourable for those who shared your efforts. | |||
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<font color="green">''Delegation''</font> : | <font color="green">''Delegation''</font>: But it is useless, since we will be refused. We will be rudely pushed away. | ||
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<font color="blue">''Mr. Papineau''</font> : Impossible. | <font color="blue">''Mr. Papineau''</font>: Impossible. I refer you to gentlemen. | ||
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