CHAPTER 1V

I'HE ALTERATION OF THE CONSTITUTION

y 1. THE CONSTITUENT AUTHORITY OF Dominion
PARLIAMENTS

THE next restriction on the powers of Colonial legislatures
arises directly from the preceding, namely the need of not
being repugnant to an Imperial Act. The Colonial Laws
Validity Act, 1865, recognizes the constituent character of
all representative legislatures, and allows it full play subject
only to a proviso that the legislation by which the constitution
 is altered must observe any rules laid down by Act of
Parliament, letters patent, Orders in Council, or Colonial
Acts applying to the Colony. The Act makes it clear that
& non-representative legislature has no power of constitubional
 change ; it can in fact be altered only by the authority
which created it in the original case: thus constitutions of
ordinary Crown Colonies granted by letters patent in one
form or another can only be altered by the same mode of
procedure or Imperial Act, and it is only an apparent
exception when the Cape was allowed by letters patent
of May 23, 1850, to alter its constitution by an ordinance :
the ordinance was merely a convenient means for allowing
 the constitution to be drafted locally, and it was
specially ratified and altered by Order in Council of March 11,
1853, which is with the earlier instrument the real basis of
the constitution. In some cases legislatures not now representative
 have been so in the past, and have by Act
vested their full powers in legislatures now existing, which
therefore have power in virtue of that fact to change their