RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT [PART 1 
a representative constitution, that constitution could not 
be recalled by the power which had granted it, and therefore 
an Imperial Act was needed to secure the reversal of a policy 
which might have proved imprudently generous. Thus it 
has resulted that in many cases the constitutions of the 
self-governing parts of the Empire rest on Imperial enact- 
ments and not on the royal prerogative, whether exercised 
in the shape of the creation in a settled Colony of a miniature 
of the Imperial constitution, or in the shape of the grant 
by a legislative Act of a constitution to a Colony acquired 
by conquest or cession. 
Thus in the case of Canada the provisions of the Royal 
Commission of 1763 were allowed to remain a dead letter : 
an Assembly was indeed convoked pro forma, but was never 
allowed to assemble: moreover, the requirement that 
members of the Assembly were to take the oaths of allegiance 
and supremacy and make the declaration against transub- 
stantiation was a hopeless drawback to any possibility of 
summoning a legislature on the lines contemplated by the 
Royal Commission, which indeed was a document hardly 
defended by any one, and for which all seemed to desire 
to avoid accepting responsibility. Accordingly a purely 
nominee legislature was established for Canada in 1774, by 
the Act 14 Geo. III. c. 83. The transition to representative 
government took place in 1791, when the Act 31 Geo. III. 
c. 31 divided Canada into two provinces and provided each 
province with the full apparatus of a legislature, consisting 
of a Governor, a Council, and an Assembly. The same 
principle prevailed in 1840, when the Union Act of that year, 
3 & 4 Vict. c. 35, united the two provinces under a representa- 
tive legislature, but simultaneously a new start was given in 
constitutional history by the enunciation and adoption of 
the principle of responsible government. 
Of the other provinces of the Dominion, Nova Scotia 
received a legislature of the usual bicameral type in 1758.2 
* Garneau, Histoire de Canada, ii. 92, 108. 
* Houston, Constitutional Documents of Canada, p. 11; Canada Sess. Pap. 
1883, No. 70, pp. 12-6.