RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT [PART 1
a representative constitution, that constitution could not
be recalled by the power which had granted it, and therefore
an Imperial Act was needed to secure the reversal of a policy
which might have proved imprudently generous. Thus it
has resulted that in many cases the constitutions of the
self-governing parts of the Empire rest on Imperial enactments
and not on the royal prerogative, whether exercised
in the shape of the creation in a settled Colony of a miniature
of the Imperial constitution, or in the shape of the grant
by a legislative Act of a constitution to a Colony acquired
by conquest or cession.
Thus in the case of Canada the provisions of the Royal
Commission of 1763 were allowed to remain a dead letter :
an Assembly was indeed convoked pro forma, but was never
allowed to assemble: moreover, the requirement that
members of the Assembly were to take the oaths of allegiance
and supremacy and make the declaration against transubstantiation
was a hopeless drawback to any possibility of
summoning a legislature on the lines contemplated by the
Royal Commission, which indeed was a document hardly
defended by any one, and for which all seemed to desire
to avoid accepting responsibility. Accordingly a purely
nominee legislature was established for Canada in 1774, by
the Act 14 Geo. III. c. 83. The transition to representative
government took place in 1791, when the Act 31 Geo. III.
c. 31 divided Canada into two provinces and provided each
province with the full apparatus of a legislature, consisting
of a Governor, a Council, and an Assembly. The same
principle prevailed in 1840, when the Union Act of that year,
3 & 4 Vict. c. 35, united the two provinces under a representative
legislature, but simultaneously a new start was given in
constitutional history by the enunciation and adoption of
the principle of responsible government.
Of the other provinces of the Dominion, Nova Scotia
received a legislature of the usual bicameral type in 1758.2
* Garneau, Histoire de Canada, ii. 92, 108.
* Houston, Constitutional Documents of Canada, p. 11; Canada Sess. Pap.
1883, No. 70, pp. 12-6.
