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 me