In his secret letter to Dorchester, Grenville referred to ‘the possibility of making such reservations of land adjacent to all future grants as may secure to the Crown a certain and improving revenue--a measure which, if it had been adopted when the old colonies were first settled, would have retained them to this hour in obedience and loyalty’. Crown land funds are not yet wholly extinct in the British colonies. For instance, in the Bahamas, side by side with the revenue voted by the local Legislature, there is a small fund independent of the Legislature and at the disposal of the Crown alone; but the revenue derived from the fund is not sufficient to pay the salaries of the Executive officers, even if it were thought desirable to apply the money to such a purpose. Barbados, with its time-honoured constitution, to which Barbadians are passionately attached, is a good instance of a colony possessing representative institutions but not responsible government. Here there are no Crown funds, and the salaries of the public officers, from the governor downwards, are voted by the elected representatives, though the higher Executive appointments, with some exceptions, are in the gift and under the control not of the Legislature but of the Crown. In this and in other instances, where local conditions, including the fact of an overwhelming preponderance of coloured men over white, have made for a compromise, a system, illogical in theory and unsound in practice, has, by mutual forbearance, continued to work, though not always without friction. But on any large scale, and especially where the majority of the residents in a colony are of European birth, the position is impossible and can only be defended as a temporary expedient. Yet, in spite of the War of American Independence and the lessons which it taught, the world was not in the days of Pitt old enough for the British ministry to contemplate colonial self-government in its full expression. Nor, in truth, were the conditions of Canada sufficiently advanced to have made the introduction of responsible government either practicable or desirable. Hence Grenville cast about for an expedient which might reduce the probability of a conflict between the Executive and the Legislature, and sought for it in the establishment of a fund which would belong to the Crown alone and be expended by the Crown in paying its officers. If his policy had been consistently carried out, and an adequate revenue, not derived from taxation, been secured to the Crown, the result would have been greatly to strengthen the independence of the Executive by making the salaries of the officers independent of the vote of the Assembly. In the end the bitterness of the struggle for popular control might have been thereby increased, but in the meantime the petty squabble year by year over voting supplies, and the mean withholding of pay from this or that officer, because he happened to be unpopular at the moment, might have disappeared.