ment, named the House of Assembly; the Senate, the upper house, was
indirectly elected and weaker in several respects; and there was no bill of
rights. In addition, with two exceptions to be noted, laws amending the
constitution could be enacted in the same way as other laws-by
simple
majorities in both houses of parliament. The judiciary thus had scarcely
any scope for testing the validity of acts of parliament. That institutional
system of winner take all, devoid of checks on the legal competence of a
majority party, was to have momentous consequences.
Second, the convention had to cope with the fact that the franchise laws
of the four colonies differed substantially. Irithe Transvaal and Orange Free
State, as we. have seen, all white men, and none but white men, were
entitled to vote in parliamentary elections or to become members ofparlia-
ment. In Natal, where the colonial government had whittled away the
political rights of blacks, white men could vote provided they satisfied quite
low economic criteria, but law and practice excluded all but a fewAfricans,
Indians, and Coloureds. In the Cape Colony, although Rhodes's admin-
istration had diminished the black proportion of the total vote in the 1890S,