Mutilations.

Grey's plan of a constitution was mutilated by one organic alteration and two amputations. According to his own account, he designed that the Legislative Council should be elected by the Provincial Councils, and the project was another of the many loan-ideas he had derived from the United States. This seems to be a partial error. One-third of the Council was, by this scheme, to consist of members nominated by the Crown. He was therefore not as much of an innovator or as perfectly consistent as he fancied. Be that as it may, in the new constitution the Legislative Council was to consist entirely of members nominated by the Crown, and such, in spite of all attempts to introduce the principle of election, the constitution of the Council still is. The granting of responsible government changed the character of this nomination. Under the old dispensation, when New Zealand was a Crown Colony, the members of the Council were appointed by the Governor in the name of the Crown; under the new they were appointed by the Ministry. Grey never ceased to regret what he deemed a blunder. A nominated Upper House, he mourned, "destroyed the glorious fabric I had been privileged to frame." That roystering Radical, Sir W. Molesworth, agreed with him, and spoke against the clause, while such advanced Liberals as Cobden and Bright gave silent votes against it. A chamber of such nominees, he believed, would necessarily consist of political Conservatives hostile to all important reforms, as in fact they have often been; and they were bitterly hostile to Grey's own advanced projects when he was Premier, especially his system of land-taxation. What would he have said had he lived to see a Legislative Council converted from a highly Conservative chamber into a thorough-going Radical one by the simple device of changing the life-tenure of its members into a seven years' page 83term, and then passing measures of a Socialistic character that have attracted the attention of all the world? The reason for the change to a nominee House was that an elected chamber would have been, like the Senate of the United States, too strong a body. The same dread has been an obstacle to making it elective ever since.

The two amputated limbs of Grey's abortion of a constitution were the municipal and rural organizations. They were wisely left to be shaped by the new legislature. Not till many years after were they perfected. The rural organs of self-government, particularly its county councils and parish councils (or townships), were one day to be adopted from her daughter by the Motherland. They were only the first links in a tributary chain that is binding the mother more closely to the daughter, and the daughters more closely to one another.