MARGRON, President of the Chamber to the message of President Canal, August 13, 1877

Response of the Chamber to the message of President Canal.

message.

To the President of Hayti:

Citizen President: The chamber has the honor to respond to your message of this day, which has had its most serious attention.

It understands with difficulty that you can invoke, in the circumstance, the law of majorities. Its duty is to remind you that the majority of the chamber has applied itself until this day to defend the cabinet wherever it has been attacked, and that the deputy Paul, whom you wished to honor with your confidence in calling him to the counsels of the executive, has always voted with that majority which has shown itself on every occasion so considerate toward the ministry.

Be well pleased to remember, Citizen President, that the members of this very ministry, the constant object of our sympathy, we would almost say of the high solicitude of the Corps Législatif, are those who, by a deliberate purpose, when the chamber expected it least, provoked by a note in the Moniteur a crisis which was so little in our expectations, and attracted this vote, which is not the work of a party, or even of the majority, but which is the expression of the unanimous sentiments of the house of representatives.

The assembly, moreover, can the less explain to itself that the refusal of Deputy Paul to accept a portfolio should put you in the impossibility of fulfilling your constitutional duties.

As to what you are pleased to call a regrettable precipitation, the chamber can explain to itself less and less the invitation which you seem to make to it to repair that precipitation by listening to the explanations which your secretaries of state might have offered to it in order to determine the responsibilities which the dignity of the nation that it represents does not permit it to provoke, being in the right as to the occurrence, and having constantly given, as it begs you not to forget, numerous and unequivocal proofs of its justice and wisdom.

The chamber, Citizen President, salutes you with the highest consideration,