Responsible government in the Dominions: Responsible government in the Dominions

Responsible government in the Dominions (Vol. 1)

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Multivolume work

Identifikator:: 1896933912

Document type:: Multivolume work

Author:: Keith, Arthur Berriedale http://d-nb.info/gnd/119086794

Title:: Responsible government in the Dominions

Place of publication:: Oxford

Publisher:: Clarendon Press

Year of publication:: 1912-

Collection:: Economics Books

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Volume

Identifikator:: 1896934455

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-236504

Document type:: Volume

Author:: Keith, Arthur Berriedale http://d-nb.info/gnd/119086794

Title:: Responsible government in the Dominions

Volume count:: Vol. 1

Place of publication:: Oxford

Publisher:: Clarendon Pr.

Year of publication:: 1912

Scope:: LI, 568 Seiten

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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Chapter

Document type:: Multivolume work

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Part III. The Parliaments of the Dominions

Collection:: Economics Books

366 PARLIAMENTS OF THE DOMINIONS [PART 111 they cannot abolish the status of the Colony as a Colony, nor the existence of the Legislature. It has indeed been argued on the analogy of the power of the Legislatures of Scotland and England to extinguish themselves in uniting into the Legisla- ture of Great Britain that this power can be exercised, but that is to forget that a Colony is not a sovereign state. That a sovereign state may decide, as did Scotland and as did England, to forgo in part its sovereignty by uniting with another part of the world is not an argument for a subordinate legislature throwing up the duties imposed upon it by the Imperial Crown or Parliament. This view, however, does not merely rest on theory, how- ever strong. It is supported by the actual practice in many cases. Thus, for example, when Jamaica desired to entrust the framing of a new constitution to the Crown in 1866 it did not merely pass an Act for this end, but the Act was confirmed and ratified by an Imperial Act, 29 & 30 Vict. c. 12, the law officers having advised that this course was necessary. Or again in 1876, when it was decided by St. Vincent and Grenada to abandon for financial reasons their autonomy, the surrender was ratified by an Imperial Act, 39 & 40 Vict. ¢. 47. On the other hand, it may be urged that the Legislature of the Virgin Islands has reduced itself since 1902 to the Governor of the Leeward Islands, and this merely by local acts, but there again the fact remains that a Governor is the Legislature endowed with all the powers which formerly the Legislature possessed, and that not by any reason of the prerogative, but by the vesting in him of all the rights possessed by the old legislatures. He legislates, but he is a legislature in himself, and he can change his own composition, though he is a, single person and not a representative legislature within the mean- ing of the Colonial Laws Validity Act, 1865, because he has had conferred upon himself the powers formerly possessed by the representative legislature of the Colony in the days when it possessed an elective assembly. Or again, in British Hon- duras the Legislature has reduced itself since 1870 to a nominee body, but that body has all the powers of the old Legislature, and can change its constitution ; it has not abolished itself nor attempted to deprive itself of its old

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