12 RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT [PART 1 
lature for the greater portion of its pecuniary resources, has 
been thwarted and harassed in its aims by the resistance of a 
body over which it has no efficient control. Governors have 
repeatedly attempted to govern by relying on frequent dissolu- 
tions, but this policy has of course seldom been successful, 
and in the main tends to defeat its own aims by exasperating 
the representatives of the people and the constituencies by 
which they are returned. Under the circumstances the 
existence of a strong Executive is impossible, and the 
bankruptcy of the system was seen strikingly in the rebellions 
of 1837 and 1838 in Lower and Upper Canada, and similarly 
in the growing weakness of the Government of Jamaica, 
which ended in the rising of 1865 among the negro popula- 
tion.! As might be expected from the weakness of the 
Government, the rising was put down with unnecessary 
violence, and the Governor was recalled, but yet earlier 
the depression caused by the abolition of slavery had led 
to a grave constitutional crisis—the Assembly refusing 
to vote supplies and endeavouring to enforce sweeping 
reductions in establishments without compensation to the 
displaced officers. 
Lord Melbourne’s Government in 1839 had proposed to 
suspend the constitution, but the Bill then introduced was 
defeated, and though harmony was restored temporarily in 
1854 by a measure of responsible government, after the 
suppression of the rebellion in 1865 the Governor, at a meet- 
ing of the Legislature, urged the unsuitability of the then 
existing form of government to meet the circumstances of 
the community, and the necessity of making some sweeping 
change by which a strong Government might be created. 
The Legislature willingly abrogated all the existing machinery 
of legislation, and left it to Her Majesty’s Government to 
substitute any other form of government which might be 
better suited to the altered circumstances of the Colony. 
While changes in the constitution have since taken place 
in the direction of greater representation of the people, 
* Cf. Lord Elgin’s view, Walrond, Letters and Journals of Lord Elgin. 
pp. 125, 126 ; Adderley, Colonial Policy, pp. 227 sed.