Hon. Charles Tupper: I am confident that there is not a British subject in British America who will learn the untimely death of President Lincoln and the circumstances under which it has occurred without the feeling of the most unfeigned sorrow and the most profound regret.

It is well known that President Lincoln was elected the President of the United States of America by the intelligent and freely expressed voice of the people of that great country; and no man who has observed the course that he has pursued can entertain a doubt that he has regarded it as a conscientious duty—a duty from which, under no circumstances, he was able in the slightest degree, to shrink—to maintain the sovereignty of his government over the entire country. That he has persistently pursued that policy with an inflexibility of determination and strength of purpose which must forever mark him as a man of commanding talents, no one can deny, and I am satisfied that the sentiment of the people, and of those who are placed over the people, throughout British North America, will agree in the opinion that he has been actuated by a conscientious discharge of what we believed to be a patriotic duty in that crisis of his country's history.

Under these circumstances I feel that it is right that the neighboring governments in British North America, as far as their means would permit, exhibit on the present occasion their deep sympathy with the people of the neighbouring states who have lost their chief ruler, and, at the same time, mark their deep abhorrence of the atrocious crime by which he has been removed.