20 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
waters against unsound legislation and chimerical schemes. As it was, 
however, these second chambers had lost ground in the public estimation 
through their very inherent weakness, representing as they did, too 
often, merely the favours of government and the demands of party, and 
not many words of dissent were heard against their abolition, No doubt, 
economical considerations also largely prevailed when it was a question 
of doing away with these chambers. No doubt, too, when these bodies 
disappeared from the political constitutions of the provinces, some im- 
portance was given to the suggestion that the veto given by the federal 
law to the dominion government over the legislation of the provinces, 
did away to a large extent with the necessity for a legislative council, for 
its raison d'être, if one may so express it. But, in the practical working 
of the federal union, the vehement and persistent assertion of “ provincial 
rights,” and the general trend of the decisions of the courts to whom 
questions of jurisdiction have been referred, have tended rather to give 
a weight and power to the provincial communities that was not con- 
templated by the leading architects of the federal framework ; cer- 
tainly not by the late Sir John Macdonald, who believed in a strong 
central government, dominating the legislation and even the administra- 
tion of the provinces, whenever necessary for reasons of urgent dominion 
policy. But the powers, granted in express terms or by necessary im- 
plication to the provincial authorities, take so wide a range, and the 
several provincial governments, from the inception of the union, have 
been so assertive of what they consider their constitutional rights, that 
it has not been possible to minimize their position in the federation, As 
it is now, the governments of the several provinces legislate on subjects 
which, though local and provincial in their nature, are intimately con- 
nected with the rights of property, and all those personal and public 
interests that touch men and women most nearly in all the relations of 
life,—far more so, necessarily, than dominion legislation, as a rule. In 
view of such a condition of things, the veto of the Dominion is now rarely 
exercised—in fact, only in cases where an act is clearly unconstitutional 
on its face, and any attempt to interfere with provincial legislation on 
other ground than its unconstitutionality or illegality, will be strenuously 
resisted by a province. In view then of the position of the veto—a sub- 
ject to which I shall again refer—there are not a few thinkers who regret 
that there are not still in all the provinces an influential upper house, 
able, from the nature of its constitution and the character and ability of 
its personnel, to initiate legislation and exercise useful control over the 
acts of a lower house now perfectly untrammelled, except by the courts, 
when legislation comes before them in due course of law. The conse- 
quences of the present system must soon show themselves one way or 
the other. I admit that these fears may be proved to have no foundation 
