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.