Page:Letter from L. J. Papineau and J. Neilson, Esqs., Addressed to His Majesty's Under Secretary of State on the Subject of the Proposed Union of the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada.djvu/14

expenditure being chiefly for local purposes, it is not likely that the votes of the members of the joint Legislature, whether in Levying or appropriating the supplies, would always be governed by fairness or justice, the population of the two Provinces have unfortunately, in these matters, opposite interests. The inhabitants of Upper Canada, from their distance from the sea, and the want of an external market for their agricultural produce, have, in great measure, ceased to be consumers of the description of goods upon which duties are raised at the port of Quebec: for rum, they have substituted whiskey of their own manufacture; for salt by the St. Lawrence, salt from the United States or from their own salt-works; for teas from England, teas from the United States; and the settlements in Upper Canada, being separated from the American territory only by a navigable river and lakes, smuggling cannot be sufficiently checked. Upper Canada has, therefore, an interest in continuing to raise the supplies upon such articles as are still consumed in Lower Canada, and it is natural that each should wish to have as large a proportion of them appropriated to its own local uses, as can be procured. The distribution of a colonial revenue for local objects, within a very limited extent of territory, is always difficult in a colonial legislature; between two distinct provinces, differing in almost every thing, excepting their common