The constitution of 1784 provided for an assembly of twenty-six members
who were elected in 1785, and met for the first time on the 3rd of
January, 1786, at the Mallard House, a plain two-storey building on the
north side of King Street. The city of St. John ceased to be the seat of
government in 1787, when the present capital, Fredericton, first known
as St. Anne's, was chosen. Of the twenty-six members elected to this
assembly, twenty-three were Loyalists, and the same class necessarily
continued for many years to predominate in the legislature. The first
speaker was Amos Botsford, the pioneer of the Loyalist migration to New
Brunswick, whose grandson occupied the same position for a short time in
the senate of the Dominion of Canada.

Coming to the province of Lower Canada we find it contained at this time
a population of about a hundred thousand souls, of whom six thousand
lived in Quebec and Montreal respectively. Only two thousand
English-speaking persons resided in the province, almost entirely in the
towns. Small as was the British minority, it continued that agitation
for an assembly which had been commenced long before the passage of the
Quebec act. A nominated council did not satisfy the political ambition
of this class, who obtained little support from the French Canadian
people. The objections of the latter arose from the working of the act
itself. Difficulties had grown up in the administration of the law,
chiefly in consequence of its being entrusted exclusively to men
acquainted only with English jurisprudence, and not disposed to comply
with the letter and intention of the imperial statute. As a matter of
practice, French law was only followed as equity suggested; and the
consequence was great legal confusion in the province. A question had
also arisen as to the legality of the issue of writs of _habeas corpus_,
and it was eventually necessary to pass an ordinance to remove all
doubts on this important point.

The Loyalist settlers on the St. Lawrence and Niagara Rivers sent a
petition in 1785 to the home government, praying for the establishment
of a new district west of the River Beaudette "with the blessings of
British laws and British government, and of exemption from French tenure
of property." While such matters were under the consideration of the
imperial authorities, Sir Guy Carleton, once more governor-general of
Canada, and lately raised to the peerage as Lord Dorchester,
established, in 1