[martin] the colonial POLICY OF THE DOMINION 47 



Legislative Assembly. This may not be the speediest but it would 

 seem to be one of the least unpleasant of more than a score of similar 

 experiments in which British communities all over the world have 

 sought similar constitutional rights. 



Much of the success may have been due to conditions peculiarly 

 favourable for the solution of a problem at once so practical and so 

 urgent. Much was undoubtedly due to statesmanship of a high order 

 in so primitive a community. The work was done by men of down- 

 right courage and optimism versed in the sovereign wisdom of historical 

 as well as political experience. The real objects for which they con- 

 tended have never been — and by their very nature can scarcely be — • 

 committed to the statute or the Order-in-Council. Responsible 

 government is an unwritten thing, or rather not a thing at all but a 

 method. In that sense the most important elements of our Canadian 

 "constitutions," both federal and provincial, are not "written" at all. 

 Section 9 of the B.N. A. Act of 1867, for instance, provides that the 

 executive government shall "continue and be vested in the Queen." 

 Similarly section 7 of the Manitoba Act provides that "the Executive 

 Council shall be composed of such persons, and under such designa- 

 tions, as the Lieutenant-Governor shall, from time to time, think fît." 

 Behind both sections lie two centuries of history and convention from 

 Pym to Elgin and Joseph Howe. Without that history and that 

 convention the letter of these Acts would mean exactly the reverse 

 of the actual practice. The spirit is to be sought not in the letter of 

 the Act but in the study of constitutional history. That of Canada 

 is rich beyond all present computation, and the march of events 

 seems to indicate that it is coming at last into its own. 



