hich I think late
events do not fully bear out; he says:--

"However partial the monarch might be to particular ministers, or
however he might have personally committed himself to their policy, he
has been _invariably_ constrained to abandon both, as soon as the
opinion of the people has been irrevocably pronounced against them,
through the medium of the House of Commons."

This he repeats in an after part of the Report:--

"When a ministry ceases to command a majority in Parliament on great
questions of policy, its doom is immediately sealed; and it would appear
to us as strange to attempt, for any time, to carry on a Government by
means of ministers perpetually in a minority, as it would be to pass
laws with a majority of votes against them."

If such be an essential part of our constitution, as his lordship
asserts, surely we have suffered an inroad into it lately.

That the system of Colonial Government is defective, I grant, but it is
not so much from the check which the Legislative Council puts upon the
Representative Assembly, as from the secrecy of the acts and decisions
of that council. This, indeed, his lordship admits in some cases, and I
think that I can fully establish that, without this salutary check, the
Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada would have soon voted themselves
Free and Independent States. Lord Durham observes:--

"I am far from concurring in the censure which the Assembly and its
advocates have attempted to cast on the acts of the Legislative Council.
I have no hesitation in saying that many of the bills which it is most
severely blamed for rejecting, were bills which it could not have passed
without a dereliction of its duty to the constitution, the connexion
with Great Britain, and the whole English population of the colony. If
there is any censure to be passed on its general conduct, it is for
having confined itself to the merely negative and defensive duties of a
legislative body; for having too frequently contented itself with merely
defeating objectionable methods of obtaining desirable ends, without
completing its duty by proposing measures, which would have achieved the
good in view without the mixture of evil. The national animosities
which pervaded the legislation of the Assembly, and its thorough want of
legislative skill or respect for constitutional principles, rendered
almost all its bills obnoxious to the objections made by the Legislative
Council; and the serious ev