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xHAP. 1] PRINCIPLES OF IMPERIAL CONTROL 1021
‘ncluded in matters affecting the prerogative, will deserve
separate treatment, and the question of pardon will be
treated of later on.
The rules forbidding a Governor to allow himself to receive
grants of land or money are a relic from Crown Colony days,
when such grants were at the disposal of a Governor, and
when he could make himself a legal title by assenting to an
Act which he secured the passing of, and then sell the lands,
giving a good title to others, so that the mere disallowance
was unavailing to prevent him profiting very substantially
by his disobedience to orders. But in the self-governing
Colonies the matter is also not without importance, for
obviously if the Governor could receive gratuities from the
Colonial Legislature he might be induced to be faithless to
his trust. At any rate, in 1866-8, as has been seen above, the
question of the grant of £20,000 to Lady Darling, the wife
of Sir Charles Darling, was a clear example of an attempt
to reward a Governor for past political services to the
Lower House of Victoria, which he had supported against
the Upper House. In that case the Governor had retired,
and there was no question of his receiving the sum through
an Act assented to by himself, but the Secretary of State
decided that the principle of the independence of Governors
must be vindicated at all costs, and the Upper House on its
part determined that they would do nothing for a Governor
who had thwarted them as far as he could! Eventually
the Secretary of State actually took the serious step of
declining, in a dispatch of January 1, 1868, to permit the new
Governor to take the formal step of asking the Parliament
to vote the amount, all money votes requiring the assent of
the Governor to their introduction, though he recalled the
instruction a month later. There has been no serious
case in a self-governing colony of such action since.
Morris, Memoir of George Higinbotham, p. 138; above, Part III,
hap. viii.
