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