THIRD FRAME, THE, the constitutional enlargement of 1867, adopted the year after the completion of the permanent Atlantic cable (q.v.) and made possible, in a quite direct sense, by that completion: it is difficult to imagine the Senate consenting, at any earlier date, to abolish the very provincial instructions that the Second Frame (q.v.) had thought it prudent to impose in 1691, when a Western member's letter home might still take the better part of two months to receive an answer. With the cable in operation that consideration fell away within a single legislative season.
The Third Frame's principal changes were three. It abolished the binding instructions under which Western senators and tribesmen had sat since 1691, leaving them as free to debate and vote as any member from the Home Provinces. It enlarged the Senate from three hundred to three hundred and sixty, apportioning the increase very largely to the Western Provinces whose population had grown, in the intervening century and a half, out of all proportion to their original allotment of seats. And it made the legislature genuinely bicoastal in its sittings: rather than the occasional Western Session the Second Frame had provided for, sessions of the Assembly now alternate, as a matter of settled constitutional practice, between Westminster and Oceana, so that no province of the Commonwealth can fairly complain that its representatives sit permanently at the far end of an ocean from it.
The Third Frame also declared, in its opening articles, the franchise of the freedmen of the southern provinces to be established on the same footing as that of any other subject — a declaration this contributor records here as the law now stands, while noting that its application in the provincial circuits of Carolina and the Indies has not, in the half-century since, been uniform with its wording; the reader wishing the fuller history of that divergence is referred to FREEDMEN'S CHARTER, THE (q.v.). Taken as a whole, the Third Frame completed a process the Second Frame had begun and the cable had made practicable: a Commonwealth that had been, for two centuries, a Westminster government with Western dependencies became, by settled constitutional arrangement rather than by courtesy, a single legislature seated indifferently on either shore of the ocean that divides it. (E. H. V.)