In my letter to your Lordships of the 14th of October last, which was forwarded by way of Boston, I had the honor to acquaint you of my intentions to wait on my Lord Loudoun at New York, and that upon my return, the business of a house of representatives recommended by your Lordships, which from the absence of the Chief Justice upon the Continent for some time past, could not be sooner attended to, should be set about with all convenient diligence. But since the receipt of your Lordships last letter, and of one from the Secretary of State, I have laid aside my design of visiting my Lord Loudoun at least for the present, and as the Chief Justice is now arrived, I shall as soon as the business of the Supreme Court, in which he is now deeply engaged is over, proceed to the consideration of what your Lordships have proposed in that respect, and in the mean time I take the liberty to enclose to your Lordships some remarks upon the expediency of this measure, pointing out the different objections & the difficulties we at present labour under in order to pave the way for carrying it into execution & which your Lordships look upon as so essentially necessary to the permanent and lasting establishment of this Infant Colony, which remarks when your Lordships shall have maturely considered, I flatter myself you will agree with me in opinion that in our present critical situation it will be no easy matter to obviate the many difficulties which naturally arise in the making such alterations in the present form of Government as your Lordships have now proposed.
I can with great truth assure your Lordships that I know not of one instance wherein his Majesty’s subjects in Nova Scotia have been in the least molested in the enjoyment of their rights and liberties to the full extent, under the present form of Government and that since I have had the honor to be entrusted with the management of the Province affairs, I have done my utmost endeavours to give satisfaction to every person in it. But my Lords it is impossible for me to redress pretended grievances that I have never been informed of nor can I indeed conjecture what reasons could be given to your Lordships by those Petitioners to induce you to think they labor under such great inconveniences from the want of an Assembly.
This much I certainly know, that those very persons who were so forward in pushing this matter during Mr. Cornwallis’s Government seen now to be entirely of opinion that a House of Representatives in the present posture of affairs instead of obviating the inconveniences complained of would serve only to create heats, animosities and disunions amongst the people at a time when the enemy is as I may say at our doors, and when the whole should join together as one man for their mutual safety and defence.
That there are malevolent and ill designing men who will take occasion to misrepresent things to the prejudice of the Colony and that there are some such in this place I have some reason to conclude. These my Lords will be always the same under any Government, not from any particular regard for their Country, or to the advantage and prosperity of the Colony but from views and motives of a very different and pIerhaps not so disinterested a nature. But that the well disposed part of His Majesty’s subjects here should be in the least uneasy under the present form of Government, I have not the least reason to surmise, because they have never signified any thing of it to me; and I dare say, if any of them have joined in the Petition your Lordships make mention of, they have been led into it through inadvertency and the specious pretences of the persons I have been just describing. But whatever might be their inducement at that time I have the most just grounds to be satisfied that they are now of a quite different way o! thinking.
Kennedy, William P. Statutes, Treaties and Documents of the Canadian Constitution: 1713-1929. Oxford Univ. Pr., 1930. https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.9_03428