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.
