under the control of the officer commanding the Imperial forces.  The Cape Government resisted, and refused to resign; and eventually the Governor, on the advice of the Home Government, dismissed his ministers.  In this case a change of government occurred after the general election, but in the end the claim put forward by the Imperial authorities had to be withdrawn.[36] In 1906 the Natal Government proclaimed martial law, and ordered the execution of twelve natives on charges of murder.  The Imperial Government intervened, and suggested the suspension of the order pending further consideration.  The Natal Ministry immediately resigned; and as there was no chance of the formation of a new Government, the Imperial authorities hastily withdrew.[37]

Differences have arisen even on so grave a matter as the succession to the throne.  The union of England and Scotland in 1707 was preceded and hastened by the so-called Act of Security, by which the Scottish Estates asserted the right to name a successor to the throne of Scotland, who should not (except under certain specified conditions) be the person designated as sovereign by the English law.  And during the illness of King George III. in the year 1788, Grattan, in defiance of the views of Pitt and of the majority in both Houses of the Imperial Parliament, carried in the Irish Parliament an address to the Prince of Wales, calling upon him (without waiting for a Regency Bill) to assume the Government of the Irish nation, “and to exercise and administer all legal power, jurisdiction and prerogatives to the Crown and Government thereof belonging”—­words borrowed from the address by which in the Revolution of 1688 William of Orange was requested to assume the Crown.  Happily, the Viceroy declined to present the address, and a deputation sent from Ireland to present it found on their arrival that the king had recovered; but the incident might have led to a conflict upon a matter so important as the exercise of the royal power.

The fact is that the word “supremacy,” so often used in this controversy, is one of ambiguous meaning.  Parliament is supreme in the United Kingdom, Parliament is likewise supreme in New Zealand; but the two supremacies are of widely different kinds.  Supremacy consists of two ingredients—­authority to enact and power to enforce; and without the latter the former is little more than a legal figment, which may have no more practical importance than the theoretical right of veto which is retained by the Crown.  Mr. Balfour, speaking on the second reading debate of the 1893 Bill, referred to this matter as follows:—­

“Legally, of course, the Imperial Parliament would be supreme:  no one has doubted it.  But what layman takes the slightest interest in these paper supremacies?  For my part I take no more interest in the question of whether the Imperial Parliament is on paper superior to the Irish Parliament, than I do as to the order of precedence at a London dinner party.