the same model, the British Constitution itself, and aiming at the same ideal, responsible Government by a Colonial Cabinet under a Government representing the Crown.  Since responsible Government in Great Britain itself was not a matter of legal enactment, but the product of slowly evolved conventions and precedents, to which political scientists had not yet given a scientific form, it is no wonder that the colonial Constitution-makers found great difficulty in expressing exactly what they wanted in legal terms, and, indeed, none of them came near succeeding; but time, their own political instinct, a succession of sensible Governors, and the forbearance of the Home Government solved the problem, and evolved home-ruled States legally subordinate to the Crown, but with a Constitution closely resembling our own.  The Constitutions became law by Acts of the Imperial Parliament passed by a Liberal Ministry in 1855.  They are of unusual interest because they represent the first rude attempt to put into legal language a small part of the theory of the British Constitution as applied to dependencies of the Crown.

In the most vital point of all, the relation of the dependency to the Home Government (as distinguished from questions of internal political structure), they are almost as reserved as the Canadian Act of 1840, which, as we have seen, did not recognize by a word the duty of the Governor to govern through a Colonial Cabinet.  In certain clauses they hint, by distant implication, at the existence of such a Cabinet, responsible to the colonial popular Legislature—­the Canadian Act did not assume even that—­but they do not anywhere imply that the Governor is bound normally to place himself in the hands of that Cabinet, while they expressly and rightly reaffirm the supreme power of the Crown, whether acting through the Governor or not, over colonial legislation.

How far this reticence about responsible Government facilitated the passage of the Australian Acts in the British Parliament, as it certainly facilitated the Canadian Act of 1840, it is difficult to decide.  It was probably a factor of some importance.  At any rate, it is true to say that Home Rule, as in Canada, was mainly a result of practice rather than of statutory enactment.  The case of New Zealand is a striking example of this.  In 1852 New Zealand obtained from a Tory Government a Constitutional Act, which resembles the Canadian Act of 1840 in abstaining from any expression, direct or indirect which implies the existence of a Colonial Cabinet, and it is probable that the framers of the Act intended no such development, but on the contrary contemplated a permanent, irremovable Executive.  But the Act was no sooner passed than an agitation began for responsible government, under the leadership of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, part-author of the Durham Report, and at that time a member of the New Zealand Assembly.  By 1855, when the Australian Acts were passed, New Zealand, without further legislation, had obtained what she wanted.