But that he had not done so was not due to want of statesmanship. He was rather still intent on seeking after a solution of the problem which later thinkers and statesmen held to be insoluble. The grant of responsible government in after times was not so much an act of constructive wisdom as a wise recognition of what was at the time impossible. To give to the colonial legislatures the control of the Executive was to remove them practically from the control of the mother country, and thereby to concede to these communities the full right of self-government. The first corrective of this grant was on similar lines to those which Chief Justice Smith prescribed, viz., to federate the self-governing communities in a given area, to place their separate legislatures under a general legislature, and, as the legislatures controlled the Executive, to limit the provincial executive authorities by a general executive authority, the control being exercised from within not from without, and small democracies being rectified by creating from among themselves a larger and a stronger democratic body. It still remains for the wisdom of the coming time to carry the constructive work further; if human ingenuity can devise a practical scheme, again to extend the principle of democratic representation and control; and to constitute a body which, with the Crown, shall, alike in legislation and in the sphere of the Executive, make the great self-governing provinces in the fullest sense partners in the Empire. In short, the point which it is here wished to emphasize is that whereas self-government was conceded not as a solution of the problem but as a final recognition that the problem was insoluble, men have come to realize that after all what was intended to be final was only a necessary preliminary to the possible attainment of an object, which had been relegated to the land of dreams and speculations. [Sidenote: The Act of 1791.]