APPENDIX NO. 5.
[Mr. Le Moine, in "Quebec Past and Present," states that slavery was finally abolished in Canada in 1803.] "Near Fort George, less than a century ago, stood the first Parliament House of Upper Canada—a building rude in comparison with the massive pile, the Bishop's Palace, used for a similar purpose at Quebec—but memorable for one at least of the many liberal laws [!-- Begin Page 212 --] its homespun representatives enacted. Here, seventy years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the first United Empire Loyalist Parliament, like the embattled farmers at Concord, 'fired a shot heard round the world.' For one of the first measures of the exiled patricians was to pass an act forbidding slavery. Few readers know that at Newark—now Niagara, Ontario—was enacted that law by which Canada became, not only the first country in the world to abolish slavery, but as such, a safe refuge for the fugitive slaves from the Southern States."—Jane Meade Welsh, in Harper's New Monthly, August, 1887.