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The English Constitution

by Walter Bagehot · English · Gutenberg #4351 · 580,092 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The English Constitution

Author: Walter Bagehot


        
Release date: August 1, 2003 [eBook #4351]
                Most recently updated: December 27, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION ***




Produced by Steve Harris, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.










THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION


By

Walter Bagehot




CONTENTS

      I.  INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION.
     II.  THE CABINET.
    III.  THE MONARCHY.
     IV.  THE HOUSE OF LORDS.
      V.  THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.
     VI.  ON CHANGES OF MINISTRY.
    VII.  ITS SUPPOSED CHECKS AND BALANCES.
   VIII.  THE PREREQUISITES OF CABINET GOVERNMENT, AND THE PECULIAR
          FORM WHICH THEY HAVE ASSUMED IN ENGLAND.
     IX.  ITS HISTORY, AND THE EFFECTS OF THAT HISTORY.--CONCLUSION.




NO. I.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION.


There is a great difficulty in the way of a writer who attempts to
sketch a living Constitution--a Constitution that is in actual work and
power. The difficulty is that the object is in constant change. An
historical writer does not feel this difficulty: he deals only with the
past; he can say definitely, the Constitution worked in such and such a
manner in the year at which he begins, and in a manner in such and such
respects different in the year at which he ends; he begins with a
definite point of time and ends with one also. But a contemporary
writer who tries to paint what is before him is puzzled and a
perplexed: what he sees is changing daily. He must paint it as it stood
at some one time, or else he will be putting side by side in his
representations things which never were contemporaneous in reality. The
difficulty is the greater because a writer who deals with a living
Government naturally compares it with the most important other living
Governments, and these are changing too; what he illustrates are
altered in one way, and his sources of illustration are altered
probably in a different way. This difficulty has been constantly in my
way in preparing a second edition of this book. It describes the
English Constitution as it stood in the years 1865 and 1866. Roughly
speaking, it describes its working as it was in the time of Lord
Palmerston; and since that time there have been many changes, some of
spirit and some of detail. In so short a period there have rarely been
more changes. If I had given a sketch of the Palmerston time as a
sketch of the present time, it would have been in many points untrue;
and if I had tried to change the sketch of seven years since into a
sketch of the present time, I should probably have blurred the picture
and have given something equally unlike both.

The best plan in such a case is, I think, to keep the original sketch
in all essentials as it was at first written, and to describe shortly
such changes either in the Constitution itself, or in the Constitutions
compared with it, as seem material. There are in this book various
expressions which allude to persons who were living and to events which
were happening when it first appeared; and I have carefully preserved
these. They will serve to warn the reader what time he is reading
about, and to prevent his mistaking the date at which the likeness was
attempted to be taken. I proceed to speak of the changes which have
taken place either in the Constitution itself or in the competing
institutions which illustrate it.

It is too soon as yet to attempt to estimate the effect of the Reform
Act of 1867. The people enfranchised under it do not yet know their
own power; a single election, so far from teaching us how they will use
that power, has not been even enough to explain to them that they have
such power. The Reform Act of 1832 did not for many years disclose its
real consequences; a writer in 1836, whether he approved or disapproved
of them, whether he thought too little of or whether he exaggerated
them, would have been sure to be mistaken in them. A new Constitution
does not produce its full effect as long as all its subjects were
reared under an old Constitution, as long as its statesmen were trained
by that old Constitution. It is not really tested till it comes to be
worked by statesmen and among a people neither of whom are guided by a
different experience.

In one respect we are indeed particularly likely to be mistaken as to
the effect of the last Reform Bill. Undeniably there has lately been a
great change in our politics. It is commonly said that "there is not a
brick of the Palmerston House standing". The change since 1865 is a
change not in one point but in a thousand points; it is a change not of
particular details but of pervading spirit. We are now quarrelling as
to the minor details of an Education Act; in Lord Palmerston's time no
such Act could have passed. In Lord Palmerston's time Sir George Grey
said that the disestablishment of the Irish Church would be an "act of
Revolution"; it has now been disestablished by great majorities, with
Sir George Grey himself assenting. A new world has arisen which is not
as the old world; and we naturally ascribe the change to the Reform
Act. But this is a complete mistake. If there had been no Reform Act at
all there would, nevertheless, have been a great change in English
politics. There has been a change of the sort which, above all,
generates other changes--a change of generation. Generally one
generation in politics succeeds another almost silently; at every
moment men of all ages between thirty and seventy have considerable
influence; each year removes many old men, makes all others older,
brings in many new. The transition is so gradual that we hardly
perceive it. The board of directors of the political company has a few
slight changes every year, and therefore the shareholders are conscious
of no abrupt change. But sometimes there IS an abrupt change. It
occasionally happens that several ruling directors who are about the
same age live on for many years, manage the company all through those
years, and then go off the scene almost together. In that case the
affairs of the company are apt to alter much, for good or for evil;
sometimes it becomes more successful, sometimes it is ruined, but it
hardly ever stays as it was. Something like this happened before 1865.
All through the period between 1832 and 1865, the pre-'32 statesmen--if
I may so call them--Lord Derby, Lord Russell, Lord Palmerston, retained
great power. Lord Palmerston to the last retained great prohibitive
power. Though in some ways always young, he had not a particle of
sympathy with the younger generation; he brought forward no young men;
he obstructed all that young men wished. In consequence, at his death a
new generation all at once started into life; the pre-'32 all at once
died out. Most of the new politicians were men who might well have been
Lord Palmerston's grandchildren. He came into Parliament in 1806, they
entered it after 1856. Such an enormous change in the age of the
workers necessarily caused a great change in the kind of work attempted
and the way in which it was done. What we call the "spirit" of politics
is more surely changed by a change of generation in the men than by any
other change whatever. Even if there had been no Reform Act, this
single cause would have effected grave alterations.

The mere settlement of the Reform question made a great change too. If
it could have been settled by any other change, or even without any
change, the instant effect of the settlement would still have been
immense. New questions would have appeared at once. A political country
is like an American forest; you have only to cut down the old trees,
and immediately new trees come up to replace them; the seeds were
waiting in the ground, and they began to grow as soon as the withdrawal
of the old ones brought in light and air. These new questions of
themselves would have made a new atmosphere, new parties, new debates.

Of course I am not arguing that so important an innovation as the
Reform Act of 1867 will not have very great effects. It must, in all
likelihood, have many great ones. I am only saying that as yet we do
not know what those effects are; that the great evident change since
1865 is certainly not strictly due to it; probably is not even in a
principal measure due to it; that we have still to conjecture what it
will cause and what it will not cause.

The principal question arises most naturally from a main doctrine of
these essays. I have said that Cabinet government is possible in
England because England was a deferential country. I meant that the
nominal constituency was not the real constituency; that the mass of
the "ten-pound" house-holders did not really form their own opinions,
and did not exact of their representatives an obedience to those
opinions; that they were in fact guided in their judgment by the better
educated classes; that they preferred representatives from those
classes, and gave those representatives much licence. If a hundred
small shopkeepers had by miracle been added to any of the '32
Parliaments, they would have felt outcasts there. Nothing could be more
unlike those Parliaments than the average mass of the constituency from
which they were chosen.

I do not of course mean that the ten-pound householders were great
admirers of intellect or good judges of refinement. We all know that,
for the most part, they were not so at all; very few Englishmen are.
They were not influenced by ideas, but by facts; not by things
impalpable, but by things palpable. Not to put too fine a point upon
it, they were influenced by rank and wealth. No doubt the better sort
of them believed that those who were superior to them in these
indisputable respects were superior also in the more intangible
qualities of sense and knowledge. But the mass of the old electors did
not analyse very much: they liked to have one of their "betters" to
represent them; if he was rich they respected him much; and if he was a
lord, they liked him the better. The issue put before these electors
was, Which of two rich people will you choose? And each of those rich
people was put forward by great parties whose notions were the notions
of the rich--whose plans were their plans. The electors only selected
one or two wealthy men to carry out the schemes of one or two wealthy
associations.

So fully was this so, that the class to whom the great body of the
ten-pound householders belonged--the lower middle class--was above all
classes the one most hardly treated in the imposition of the taxes. A
small shopkeeper, or a clerk who just, and only just, was rich enough
to pay income tax, was perhaps the only severely taxed man in the
country. He paid the rates, the tea, sugar, tobacco, malt, and spirit
taxes, as well as the income tax, but his means were exceedingly small.
Curiously enough the class which in theory was omnipotent, was the only
class financially ill-treated. Throughout the history of our former
Parliaments the constituency could no more have originated the policy
which those Parliaments selected than they could have made the solar
system.

As I have endeavoured to show in this volume, the deference of the old
electors to their betters was the only way in which our old system
could be maintained. No doubt countries can be imagined in which the
mass of the electors would be thoroughly competent to form good
opinions; approximations to that state happily exist. But such was not
the state of the minor English shopkeepers. They were just competent to
make a selection between two sets of superior ideas; or rather--for the
conceptions of such people are more personal than abstract--between two
opposing parties, each professing a creed of such ideas. But they could
do no more. Their own notions, if they had been cross-examined upon
them, would have been found always most confused and often most
foolish. They were competent to decide an issue selected by the higher
classes, but they were incompetent to do more.

The grave question now is, How far will this peculiar old system
continue and how far will it be altered? I am afraid I must put aside
at once the idea that it will be altered entirely and altered for the
better. I cannot expect that the new class of voters will be at all
more able to form sound opinions on complex questions than the old
voters. There was indeed an idea--a very prevalent idea when the first
edition of this book was published--that there then was an
unrepresented class of skilled artisans who could form superior
opinions on national matters, and ought to have the means of expressing
them. We used to frame elaborate schemes to give them such means. But
the Reform Act of 1867 did not stop at skilled labour; it enfranchised
unskilled labour too. And no one will contend that the ordinary working
man who has no special skill, and who is only rated because he has a
house, can judge much of intellectual matters. The messenger in an
office is not more intelligent than the clerks, not better educated,
but worse; and yet the messenger is probably a very superior specimen
of the newly enfranchised classes. The average can only earn very
scanty wages by coarse labour. They have no time to improve themselves,
for they are labouring the whole day through; and their early education
was so small that in most cases it is dubious whether even if they had
much time, they could use it to good purpose. We have not enfranchised
a class less needing to be guided by their betters than the old class;
on the contrary, the new class need it more than the old. The real
question is, Will they submit to it, will they defer in the same way to
wealth and rank, and to the higher qualities of which these are the
rough symbols and the common accompaniments?

There is a peculiar difficulty in answering this question. Generally,
the debates upon the passing of an Act contain much valuable
instruction as to what may be expected of it. But the debates on the
Reform Act of 1867 hardly tell anything. They are taken up with
technicalities as to the ratepayers and the compound householder.
Nobody in the country knew what was being done. I happened at the time
to visit a purely agricultural and Conservative county, and I asked the
local Tories, "Do you understand this Reform Bill? Do you know that
your Conservative Government has brought in a Bill far more Radical
than any former Bill, and that it is very likely to be passed?" The
answer I got was, "What stuff you talk! How can it be a Radical Reform
Bill? Why, BRIGHT opposes it!" There was no answering that in a way
which a "common jury" could understand. The Bill was supported by the
Times and opposed by Mr. Bright; and therefore the mass of the
Conservatives and of common moderate people, without distinction of
party, had no conception of the effect. They said it was "London
nonsense" if you tried to explain it to them. The nation indeed
generally looks to the discussions in Parliament to enlighten it as to
the effect of Bills. But in this case neither party, as a party, could
speak out. Many, perhaps most of the intelligent Conservatives, were
fearful of the consequences of the proposal; but as it was made by the
heads of their own party, they did not like to oppose it, and the
discipline of party carried them with it. On the other side, many,
probably most of the intelligent Liberals, were in consternation at the
Bill; they had been in the habit for years of proposing Reform Bills;
they knew the points of difference between each Bill, and perceived
that this was by far the most sweeping which had ever been proposed by
any Ministry. But they were almost all unwilling to say so. They would
have offended a large section in their constituencies if they had
resisted a Tory Bill because it was too democratic; the extreme
partisans of democracy would have said, "The enemies of the people have
confidence enough in the people to entrust them with this power, but
you, a 'Liberal,' and a professed friend of the people, have not that
confidence; if that is so, we will never vote for you again". Many
Radical members who had been asking for years for household suffrage
were much more surprised than pleased at the near chance of obtaining
it; they had asked for it as bargainers ask for the highest possible
price, but they never expected to get it. Altogether the Liberals, or
at least the extreme Liberals, were much like a man who has been
pushing hard against an opposing door, till, on a sudden, the door
opens, the resistance ceases, and he is thrown violently forward.
Persons in such an unpleasant predicament can scarcely criticise
effectually, and certainly the Liberals did not so criticise. We have
had no such previous discussions as should guide our expectations from
the Reform Bill, nor such as under ordinary circumstances we should
have had.

Nor does the experience of the last election much help us. The
circumstances were too exceptional. In the first place, Mr. Gladstone's
personal popularity was such as has not been seen since the time of Mr.
Pitt, and such as may never be seen again. Certainly it will very
rarely be seen. A bad speaker is said to have been asked how he got on
as a candidate. "Oh," he answered, "when I do not know what to say, I
say 'Gladstone,' and then they are sure to cheer, and I have time to
think." In fact, that popularity acted as a guide both to
constituencies and to members. The candidates only said they would vote
with Mr. Gladstone, and the constituencies only chose those who said
so. Even the minority could only be described as anti-Gladstone, just
as the majority could only be described as pro-Gladstone. The remains,
too, of the old electoral organisation were exceedingly powerful; the
old voters voted as they had been told, and the new voters mostly voted
with them. In extremely few cases was there any new and contrary
organisation. At the last election, the trial of the new system hardly
began, and, as far as it did begin, it was favoured by a peculiar
guidance.

In the meantime our statesmen have the greatest opportunities they have
had for many years, and likewise the greatest duty. They have to guide
the new voters in the exercise of the franchise; to guide them quietly,
and without saying what they are doing, but still to guide them. The
leading statesmen in a free country have great momentary power. They
settle the conversation of mankind. It is they who, by a great speech
or two, determine what shall be said and what shall be written for long
after. They, in conjunction with their counsellors, settle the
programme of their party--the "platform," as the Americans call it, on
which they and those associated with them are to take their stand for
the political campaign. It is by that programme, by a comparison of the
programmes of different statesmen, that the world forms its judgment.
The common ordinary mind is quite unfit to fix for itself what
political question it shall attend to; it is as much as it can do to
judge decently of the questions which drift down to it, and are brought
before it; it almost never settles its topics; it can only decide upon
the issues of those topics. And in settling what these questions shall
be, statesmen have now especially a great responsibility if they raise
questions which will excite the lower orders of mankind; if they raise
questions on which those orders are likely to be wrong; if they raise
questions on which the interest of those orders is not identical with,
or is antagonistic to, the whole interest of the State, they will have
done the greatest harm they can do. The future of this country depends
on the happy working of a delicate experiment, and they will have done
all they could to vitiate that experiment. Just when it is desirable
that ignorant men, new to politics, should have good issues, and only
good issues, put before them, these statesmen will have suggested bad
issues. They will have suggested topics which will bind the poor as a
class together; topics which will excite them against the rich; topics
the discussion of which in the only form in which that discussion
reaches their ear will be to make them think that some new law can make
them comfortable--that it is the present law which makes them
uncomfortable--that Government has at its disposal an inexhaustible
fund out of which it can give to those who now want without also
creating elsewhere other and greater wants. If the first work of the
poor voters is to try to create a "poor man's paradise," as poor men
are apt to fancy that Paradise, and as they are apt to think they can
create it, the great political trial now beginning will simply fail.
The wide gift of the elective franchise will be a great calamity to the
whole nation, and to those who gain it as great a calamity as to any.

I do not of course mean that statesmen can choose with absolute freedom
what topics they will deal with and what they will not. I am of course
aware that they choose under stringent conditions. In excited states of
the public mind they have scarcely a discretion at all; the tendency of
the public perturbation determines what shall and what shall not be
dealt with. But, upon the other hand, in quiet times statesmen have
great power; when there is no fire lighted, they can settle what fire
shall be lit. And as the new suffrage is happily to be tried in a quiet
time, the responsibility of our statesmen is great because their power
is great too.

And the mode in which the questions dealt with are discussed is almost
as important as the selection of these questions. It is for our
principal statesmen to lead the public, and not to let the public lead
them. No doubt when statesmen live by public favour, as ours do, this
is a hard saying, and it requires to be carefully limited. I do not
mean that our statesmen should assume a pedantic and doctrinaire tone
with the English people; if there is anything which English people
thoroughly detest, it is that tone exactly. And they are right in
detesting it; if a man cannot give guidance and communicate instruction
formally without telling his audience "I am better than you; I have
studied this as you have not," then he is not fit for a guide or an
instructor. A statesman who should show that gaucherie would exhibit a
defect of imagination, and expose an incapacity for dealing with men
which would be a great hindrance to him in his calling. But much
argument is not required to guide the public, still less a formal
exposition of that argument. What is mostly needed is the manly
utterance of clear conclusions; if a statesman gives these in a
felicitous way (and if with a few light and humorous illustrations, so
much the better), he has done his part. He will have given the text,
the scribes in the newspapers will write the sermon. A statesman ought
to show his own nature, and talk in a palpable way what is to him
important truth. And so he will both guide and benefit the nation. But
if, especially at a time when great ignorance has an unusual power in
public affairs, he chooses to accept and reiterate the decisions of
that ignorance, he is only the hireling of the nation, and does little
save hurt it.

I shall be told that this is very obvious, and that everybody knows
that 2 and 2 make 4, and that there is no use in inculcating it. But I
answer that the lesson is not observed in fact; people do not so do
their political sums. Of all our political dangers, the greatest I
conceive is that they will neglect the lesson. In plain English, what I
fear is that both our political parties will bid for the support of the
working man; that both of them will promise to do as he likes if he
will only tell them what it is; that, as he now holds the casting vote
in our affairs, both parties will beg and pray him to give that vote to
them. I can conceive of nothing more corrupting or worse for a set of
poor ignorant people than that two combinations of well-taught and rich
men should constantly offer to defer to their decision, and compete for
the office of executing it. Vox populi will be Vox diaboli if it is
worked in that manner.

And, on the other hand, my imagination conjures up a contrary danger. I
can conceive that questions BEING raised which, if continually
agitated, would combine the working men as a class together, the higher
orders might have to consider whether they would concede the measure
that would settle such questions, or whether they would risk the effect
of the working men's combination.

No doubt the question cannot be easily discussed in the abstract; much
must depend on the nature of the measures in each particular case; on
the evil they would cause if conceded; on the attractiveness of their
idea to the working classes if refused. But in all cases it must be
remembered that a political combination of the lower classes, as such
and for their own objects, is an evil of the first magnitude; that a
permanent combination of them would make them (now that so many of them
have the suffrage) supreme in the country; and that their supremacy, in
the state they now are, means the supremacy of ignorance over
instruction and of numbers over knowledge. So long as they are not
taught to act together, there is a chance of this being averted, and it
can only be averted by the greatest wisdom and the greatest foresight
in the higher classes. They must avoid, not only every evil, but every
appearance of evil; while they have still the power they must remove,
not only every actual grievance, but, where it is possible, every
seeming grievance too; they must willingly concede every claim which
they can safely concede, in order that they may not have to concede
unwillingly some claim which would impair the safety of the country.

This advice, too, will be said to be obvious; but I have the greatest
fear that, when the time comes, it will be cast aside as timid and
cowardly. So strong are the combative propensities of man that he would
rather fight a losing battle than not fight at all. It is most
difficult to persuade people that by fighting they may strengthen the
enemy, yet that would be so here; since a losing battle--especially a
long and well-fought one--would have thoroughly taught the lower orders
to combine, and would have left the higher orders face to face with an
irritated, organised, and superior voting power. The courage which
strengthens an enemy and which so loses, not only the present battle,
but many after battles, is a heavy curse to men and nations.

In one minor respect, indeed, I think we may see with distinctness the
effect of the Reform Bill of 1867. I think it has completed one change
which the Act of 1832 began; it has completed the change which that Act
made in the relation of the House of Lords to the House of Commons. As
I have endeavoured in this book to explain, the literary theory of the
English Constitution is on this point quite wrong as usual. According
to that theory, the two Houses are two branches of the legislature,
perfectly equal and perfectly distinct. But before the Act of 1832 they
were not so distinct; there was a very large and a very strong common
element. By their commanding influence in many boroughs and counties
the Lords nominated a considerable part of the Commons; the majority of
the other part were the richer gentry--men in most respects like the
Lords, and sympathising with the Lords. Under the Constitution as it
then was the two Houses were not in their essence distinct; they were
in their essence similar; they were, in the main, not Houses of
contrasted origin, but Houses of like origin. The predominant part of
both was taken from the same class--from the English gentry, titled and
untitled. By the Act of 1832 this was much altered. The aristocracy and
the gentry lost their predominance in the House of Commons; that
predominance passed to the middle class. The two Houses then became
distinct, but then they ceased to be co-equal. The Duke of Wellington,
in a most remarkable paper, has explained what pains he took to induce
the Lords to submit to their new position, and to submit, time after
time, their will to the will of the Commons.

The Reform Act of 1867 has, I think, unmistakably completed the effect
which the Act of 1832 began, but left unfinished. The middle class
element has gained greatly by the second change, and the aristocratic
element has lost greatly. If you examine carefully the lists of
members, especially of the most prominent members, of either side of
the House, you will not find that they are in general aristocratic
names. Considering the power and position of the titled aristocracy,
you will perhaps be astonished at the small degree in which it
contributes to the active part of our governing assembly. The spirit of
our present House of Commons is plutocratic, not aristocratic; its most
prominent statesmen are not men of ancient descent or of great
hereditary estate; they are men mostly of substantial means, but they
are mostly, too, connected more or less closely with the new trading
wealth. The spirit of the two Assemblies has become far more contrasted
than it ever was.

The full effect of the Reform Act of 1832 was indeed postponed by the
cause which I mentioned just now. The statesmen who worked the system
which was put up had themselves been educated under the system which
was pulled down. Strangely enough, their predominant guidance lasted as
long as the system which they created. Lord Palmerston, Lord Russell,
Lord Derby, died or else lost their influence within a year or two of
1867. The complete consequences of the Act of 1832 upon the House of
Lords could not be seen while the Commons were subject to such
aristocratic guidance. Much of the change which might have been
expected from the Act of 1832 was held in suspense, and did not begin
till that measure had been followed by another of similar and greater
power.

The work which the Duke of Wellington in part performed has now,
therefore, to be completed also. He met the half difficulty; we have to
surmount the whole one. We have to frame such tacit rules, to establish
such ruling but unenacted customs, as will make the House of Lords
yield to the Commons when and as often as our new Constitution requires
that it should yield. I shall be asked, How often is that, and what is
the test by which you know it? I answer that the House of Lords must
yield whenever the opinion of the Commons is also the opinion of the
nation, and when it is clear that the nation has made up its mind.
Whether or not the nation has made up its mind is a question to be
decided by all the circumstances of the case, and in the common way in
which all practical questions are decided. There are some people who
lay down a sort of mechanical test; they say the House of Lords should
be at liberty to reject a measure passed by the Commons once or more,
and then if the Commons send it up again and again, infer that the
nation is determined. But no important practical question in real life
can be uniformly settled by a fixed and formal rule in this way. This
rule would prove that the Lords might have rejected the Reform Act of
1832. Whenever the nation was both excited and determined, such a rule
would be an acute and dangerous political poison. It would teach the
House of Lords that it might shut its eyes to all the facts of real
life and decide simply by an abstract formula. If in 1832 the Lords had
so acted, there would have been a revolution. Undoubtedly there is a
general truth in the rule. Whether a bill has come up once only, or
whether it has come up several times, is one important fact in judging
whether the nation is determined to have that measure enacted; it is an
indication, but it is only one of the indications. There are others
equally decisive. The unanimous voice of the people may be so strong,
and may be conveyed through so many organs, that it may be assumed to
be lasting.

Englishmen are so very miscellaneous, that that which has REALLY
convinced a great and varied majority of them for the present may
fairly be assumed to be likely to continue permanently to convince
them. One sort might easily fall into a temporary and erroneous
fanaticism, but all sorts simultaneously are very unlikely to do so.

I should venture so far as to lay down for an approximate rule, that
the House of Lords ought, on a first-class subject, to be slow--very
slow--in rejecting a Bill passed even once by a large majority of the
House of Commons. I would not of course lay this down as an unvarying
rule; as I have said, I have for practical purposes no belief in
unvarying rules. Majorities may be either genuine or fictitious, and if
they are not genuine, if they do not embody the opinion of the
representative as well as the opinion of the constituency, no one would
wish to have any attention paid to them. But if the opinion of the
nation be strong and be universal, if it be really believed by members
of Parliament, as well as by those who send them to Parliament, in my
judgment the Lords should yield at once, and should not resist it.

My main reason is one which has not been much urged. As a theoretical
writer I can venture to say, what no elected member of Parliament,
Conservative or Liberal, can venture to say, that I am exceedingly
afraid of the ignorant multitude of the new constituencies. I wish to
have as great and as compact a power as possible to resist it. But a
dissension between the Lords and Commons divides that resisting power;
as I have explained, the House of Commons still mainly represents the
plutocracy, the Lords represent the aristocracy. The main interest of
both these classes is now identical, which is to prevent or to mitigate
the rule of uneducated numbers. But to prevent it effectually, they
must not quarrel among themselves; they must not bid one against the
other for the aid of their common opponent. And this is precisely the
effect of a division between Lords and Commons. The two great bodies of
the educated rich go to the constituencies to decide between them, and
the majority of the constituencies now consist of the uneducated poor.
This cannot be for the advantage of any one.

In doing so besides the aristocracy forfeit their natural
position--that by which they would gain most power, and in which they
would do most good. They ought to be the heads of the plutocracy. In
all countries new wealth is ready to worship old wealth, if old wealth
will only let it, and I need not say that in England new wealth is
eager in its worship. Satirist after satirist has told us how quick,
how willing, how anxious are the newly-made rich to associate with the
ancient rich. Rank probably in no country whatever has so much "market"
value as it has in England just now. Of course there have been many
countries in which certain old families, whether rich or poor, were
worshipped by whole populations with a more intense and poetic homage;
but I doubt if there has ever been any in which all old families and
all titled families received more ready observance from those who were
their equals, perhaps their superiors, in wealth, their equals in
culture, and their inferiors only in descent and rank. The possessors
of the "material" distinctions of life, as a political economist would
class them, rush to worship those who possess the immaterial
distinctions. Nothing can be more politically useful than such homage,
if it be skilfully used; no folly can be idler than to repel and reject
it.

The worship is the more politically important because it is the worship
of the political superior for the political inferior. At an election
the non-titled are much more powerful than the titled. Certain
individual peers have, from their great possessions, great
electioneering influence, but, as a whole, the House of Peers is not a
principal electioneering force. It has so many poor men inside it, and
so many rich men outside it, that its electioneering value is impaired.
Besides, it is in the nature of the curious influence of rank to work
much more on men singly than on men collectively; it is an influence
which most men--at least most Englishmen--feel very much, but of which
most Englishmen are somewhat ashamed. Accordingly, when any number of
men are collected together, each of whom worships rank in his heart,
the whole body will patiently hear--in many cases will cheer and
approve--some rather strong speeches against rank. Each man is a little
afraid that his "sneaking kindness for a lord," as Mr. Gladstone put
it, be found out; he is not sure how far that weakness is shared by
those around him. And thus Englishmen easily find themselves committed
to anti-aristocratic sentiments which are the direct opposite of their
real feeling, and their collective action may be bitterly hostile to
rank while the secret sentiment of each separately is especially
favourable to rank. In 1832 the close boroughs, which were largely held
by peers, and were still more largely supposed to be held by them, were
swept away with a tumult of delight; and in another similar time of
great excitement, the Lords themselves, if they deserve it, might pass
away. The democratic passions gain by fomenting a diffused excitement,
and by massing men in concourses; the aristocratic sentiments gain by
calm and quiet, and act most on men by themselves, in their families,
and when female influence is not absent. The overt electioneering power
of the Lords does not at all equal its real social power. The English
plutocracy, as is often said of something yet coarser, must be
"humoured, not drove"; they may easily be impelled against the
aristocracy, though they respect it very much; and as they are much
stronger than the aristocracy, they might, if angered, even destroy it;
though in order to destroy it, they must help to arouse a wild
excitement among the ignorant poor, which, if once roused, may not be
easily calmed, and which may be fatal to far more than its beginners
intend.

This is the explanation of the anomaly which puzzles many clever lords.
They think, if they do not say, "Why are we pinned up here? Why are we
not in the Commons where we could have so much more power? Why is this
nominal rank given us, at the price of substantial influence? If we
prefer real weight to unreal prestige, why may we not have it?" The
reply is, that the whole body of the Lords have an incalculably greater
influence over society while there is still a House of Lords, than they
would have if the House of Lords were abolished; and that though one or
two clever young peers might do better in the Commons, the old order of
peers, young and old, clever and not clever, is much better where it
is. The selfish instinct of the mass of peers on this point is a keener
and more exact judge of the real world than the fine intelligence of
one or two of them.

If the House of Peers ever goes, it will go in a storm, and the storm
will not leave all else as it is. It will not destroy the House of
Peers and leave the rich young peers, with their wealth and their
titles, to sit in the Commons. It would probably sweep all titles
before it--at least all legal titles--and somehow or other it would
break up the curious system by which the estates of great families all
go to the eldest son. That system is a very artificial one; you may
make a fine argument for it, but you cannot make a loud argument, an
argument which would reach and rule the multitude. The thing looks like
injustice, and in a time of popular passion it would not stand. Much
short of the compulsory equal division of the Code Napoleon, stringent
clauses might be provided to obstruct and prevent these great
aggregations of property. Few things certainly are less likely than a
violent tempest like this to destroy large and hereditary estates. But
then, too, few things are less likely than an outbreak to destroy the
House of Lords--my point is, that a catastrophe which levels one will
not spare the other.

I conceive, therefore, that the great power of the House of Lords
should be exercised very timidly and very cautiously. For the sake of
keeping the headship of the plutocracy, and through that of the nation,
they should not offend the plutocracy; the points upon which they have
to yield are mostly very minor ones, and they should yield many great
points rather than risk the bottom of their power. They should give
large donations out of income, if by so doing they keep, as they would
keep, their capital intact. The Duke of Wellington guided the House of
Lords in this manner for years, and nothing could prosper better for
them or for the country, and the Lords have only to go back to the good
path in which he directed them.

The events of 1870 caused much discussion upon life peerages, and we
have gained this great step, that whereas the former leader of the Tory
party in the Lords--Lord Lyndhurst--defeated the last proposal to make
life peers, Lord Derby, when leader of that party, desired to create
them. As I have given in this book what seemed to me good reasons for
making them, I need not repeat those reasons here; I need only say how
the notion stands in my judgment now.

I cannot look on life peerages in the way in which some of their
strongest advocates regard them; I cannot think of them as a mode in
which a permanent opposition or a contrast between the Houses of Lords
and Commons is to be remedied. To be effectual in that way, life
peerages must be very numerous. Now the House of Lords will never
consent to a very numerous life peerage without a storm; they must be
in terror to do it, or they will not do it. And if the storm blows
strongly enough to do so much, in all likelihood it will blow strongly
enough to do much more. If the revolution is powerful enough and eager
enough to make an immense number of life peers, probably it will sweep
away the hereditary principle in the Upper Chamber entirely. Of course
one may fancy it to be otherwise; we may conceive of a political storm
just going to a life-peerage limit, and then stopping suddenly. But in
politics we must not trouble ourselves with exceedingly exceptional
accidents; it is quite difficult enough to count on and provide for the
regular and plain probabilities. To speak mathematically, we may easily
miss the permanent course of the political curve if we engross our
minds with its cusps and conjugate points.

Nor, on the other hand, can I sympathise with the objection to life
peerages which some of the Radical party take and feel. They think it
will strengthen the Lords, and so make them better able to oppose the
Commons; they think, if they do not say: "The House of Lords is our
enemy and that of all Liberals; happily the mass of it is not
intellectual; a few clever men are born there which we cannot help, but
we will not 'vaccinate' it with genius; we will not put in a set of
clever men for their lives who may as likely as not turn against us".
This objection assumes that clever peers are just as likely to oppose
the Commons as stupid peers. But this I deny. Most clever men who are
in such a good place as the House of Lords plainly is, will be very
unwilling to lose it if they can help it; at the clear call of a great
duty they might lose it, but only at such a call. And it does not take
a clever man to see that systematic opposition of the Commons is the
only thing which can endanger the Lords, or which will make an
individual peer cease to be a peer. The greater you make the SENSE of
the Lords, the more they will see that their plain interest is to make
friends of the plutocracy, and to be the chiefs of it, and not to wish
to oppose the Commons where that plutocracy rules.

It is true that a completely new House of Lords, mainly composed of men
of ability, selected because they were able, might very likely attempt
to make ability the predominant power in the State, and to rival, if
not conquer, the House of Commons, where the standard of intelligence
is not much above the common English average. But in the present
English world such a House of Lords would soon lose all influence.
People would say, "it was too clever by half," and in an Englishman's
mouth that means a very severe censure. The English people would think
it grossly anomalous if their elected assembly of rich men were
thwarted by a nominated assembly of talkers and writers. Sensible men
of substantial means are what we wish to be ruled by, and a peerage of
genius would not compare with it in power.

It is true, too, that at present some of the cleverest peers are not so
ready as some others to agree with the Commons. But it is not unnatural
that persons of high rank and of great ability should be unwilling to
bend to persons of lower rank, and of certainly not greater ability. A
few of such peers (for they are very few) might say, "We had rather not
have our peerage if we are to buy it at the price of yielding". But a
life peer who had fought his way up to the peers, would never think so.
Young men who are born to rank may risk it, not middle-aged or old men
who have earned their rank. A moderate number of life peers would
almost always counsel moderation to the Lords, and would almost always
be right in counselling it.

Recent discussions have also brought into curious prominence another
part of the Constitution. I said in this book that it would very much
surprise people if they were only told how many things the Queen could
do without consulting Parliament, and it certainly has so proved, for
when the Queen abolished Purchase in the Army by an act of prerogative
(after the Lords had rejected the bill for doing so), there was a great
and general astonishment.

But this is nothing to what the Queen can by law do without consulting
Parliament. Not to mention other things, she could disband the army (by
law she cannot engage more than a certain number of men, but she is not
obliged to engage any men); she could dismiss all the officers, from
the General Commanding-in-Chief downwards; she could dismiss all the
sailors too; she could sell off all our ships of war and all our naval
stores; she could make a peace by the sacrifice of Cornwall, and begin
a war for the conquest of Brittany. She could make every citizen in the
United Kingdom, male or female, a peer; she could make every parish in
the United Kingdom a "university"; she could dismiss most of the civil
servants; she could pardon all offenders. In a word, the Queen could by
prerogative upset all the action of civil government within the
Government, could disgrace the nation by a bad war or peace, and could,
by disbanding our forces, whether land or sea, leave us defenceless
against foreign nations. Why do we not fear that she would do this, or
any approach to it?

Because there are two checks--one ancient and coarse, the other modern
and delicate. The first is the check of impeachment. Any Minister who
advised the Queen so to use her prerogative as to endanger the safety
of the realm, might be impeached for high treason, and would be so.
Such a Minister would, in our technical law, be said to have levied, or
aided to levy, "war against the Queen". This counsel to her so to use
her prerogative would by the Judge be declared to be an act of violence
against herself, and in that peculiar but effectual way the offender
could be condemned and executed. Against all gross excesses of the
prerogative this is a sufficient protection. But it would be no
protection against minor mistakes; any error of judgment committed bona
fide, and only entailing consequences which one person might say were
good, and another say were bad, could not be so punished. It would be
possible to impeach any Minister who disbanded the Queen's army, and it
would be done for certain. But suppose a Minister were to reduce the
army or the navy much below the contemplated strength--suppose he were
only to spend upon them one-third of the amount which Parliament had
permitted him to spend--suppose a Minister of Lord Palmerston's
principles were suddenly and while in office converted to the
principles of Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden, and were to act on those
principles, he could not be impeached. The law of treason neither could
nor ought to be enforced against an act which was an error of judgment,
not of intention--which was in good faith intended not to impair the
well-being of the State, but to promote and augment it. Against such
misuses of the prerogative our remedy is a change of Ministry. And in
general this works very well. Every Minister looks long before he
incurs that penalty, and no one incurs it wantonly. But, nevertheless,
there are two defects in it. The first is that it may not be a remedy
at all; it may be only a punishment. A Minister may risk his dismissal;
he may do some act difficult to undo, and then all which may be left
will be to remove and censure him. And the second is that it is only
one House of Parliament which has much to say to this remedy, such as
it is; the House of Commons only can remove a Minister by a vote of
censure. Most of the Ministries for thirty years have never possessed
the confidence of the Lords, and in such cases a vote of censure by the
Lords could therefore have but little weight; it would be simply the
particular expression of a general political disapproval. It would be
like a vote of censure on a Liberal Government by the Carlton, or on a
Tory Government by the Reform Club. And in no case has an adverse vote
by the Lords the same decisive effect as a vote of the Commons; the
Lower House is the ruling and the choosing House, and if a Government
really possesses that, it thoroughly possesses nine-tenths of what it
requires. The support of the Lords is an aid and a luxury; that of the
Commons is a strict and indispensable necessary.

These difficulties are particularly raised by questions of foreign
policy. On most domestic subjects, either custom or legislation has
limited the use of the prerogative. The mode of governing the country,
according to the existing laws, is mostly worn into a rut, and most
administrations move in it because it is easier to move there than
anywhere else. Most political crises--the decisive votes, which
determine the fate of Government--are generally either on questions of
foreign policy or of new laws; and the questions of foreign policy come
out generally in this way, that the Government has already done
something, and that it is for the one part of the legislature
alone--for the House of Commons, and not for the House of Lords--to say
whether they have or have not forfeited their place by the treaty they
have made.

I think every one must admit that this is not an arrangement which
seems right on the face of it. Treaties are quite as important as most
laws, and to require the elaborate assent of representative assemblies
to every word of the law, and not to consult them even as to the
essence of the treaty, is prima facie ludicrous. In the older forms of
the English Constitution, this may have been quite right; the power was
then really lodged in the Crown, and because Parliament met very
seldom, and for other reasons, it was then necessary that, on a
multitude of points, the Crown should have much more power than is
amply sufficient for it at present. But now the real power is not in
the Sovereign, it is in the Prime Minister and in the Cabinet--that is,
in the hands of a committee appointed by Parliament, and of the
chairman of that committee. Now, beforehand, no one would have ventured
to suggest that a committee of Parliament on foreign relations should
be able to commit the country to the greatest international obligations
without consulting either Parliament or the country. No other select
committee has any comparable power; and considering how carefully we
have fettered and limited the powers of all other subordinate
authorities, our allowing so much discretionary power on matters
peculiarly dangerous and peculiarly delicate to rest in the sole charge
of one secret committee is exceedingly strange. No doubt it may be
beneficial; many seeming anomalies are so, but at first sight it does
not look right.

I confess that I should see no advantage in it if our two Chambers were
sufficiently homogeneous and sufficiently harmonious. On the contrary,
if those two Chambers were as they ought to be, I should believe it to
be a great defect. If the administration had in both Houses a
majority--not a mechanical majority ready to accept anything, but a
fair and reasonable one, predisposed to think the Government right, but
not ready to find it to be so in the face of facts and in opposition to
whatever might occur; if a good Government were thus placed, I should
think it decidedly better that the agreements of the administration
with foreign powers should be submitted to Parliament. They would then
receive that which is best for all arrangements of business, an
understanding and sympathising criticism, but still a criticism. The
majority of the legislature, being well disposed to the Government,
would not "find" against it except it had really committed some big and
plain mistake. But if the Government had made such a mistake, certainly
the majority of the legislature would find against it. In a country fit
for Parliamentary institutions, the partisanship of members of the
legislature never comes in manifest opposition to the plain interest of
the nation; if it did, the nation being (as are all nations capable of
Parliamentary institutions) constantly attentive to public affairs,
would inflict on them the maximum Parliamentary penalty at the next
election and at many future elections. It would break their career. No
English majority dare vote for an exceedingly bad treaty; it would
rather desert its own leader than ensure its own ruin. And an English
minority, inheriting a long experience of Parliamentary affairs, would
not be exceedingly ready to reject a treaty made with a foreign
Government. The leaders of an English Opposition are very conversant
with the school-boy maxim, "Two can play at that fun". They know that
the next time they are in office the same sort of sharp practice may be
used against them, and therefore they will not use it. So strong is
this predisposition, that not long since a subordinate member of the
Opposition declared that the "front benches" of the two sides of the
House--that is, the leaders of the Government and the leaders of the
Opposition--were in constant tacit league to suppress the objections of
independent members. And what he said is often quite true. There are
often seeming objections which are not real objections; at least, which
are, in the particular cases, outweighed by counter-considerations; and
these "independent members," having no real responsibility, not being
likely to be hurt themselves if they make a mistake, are sure to blurt
out, and to want to act upon. But the responsible heads of the party
who may have to decide similar things, or even the same things
themselves, will not permit it. They refuse, out of interest as well as
out of patriotism, to engage the country in a permanent foreign scrape,
to secure for themselves and their party a momentary home advantage.
Accordingly, a Government which negotiated a treaty would feel that its
treaty would be subject certainly to a scrutiny, but still to a candid
and lenient scrutiny; that it would go before judges, of whom the
majority were favourable, and among whom the most influential part of
the minority were in this case much opposed to excessive antagonism.
And this seems to be the best position in which negotiators can be
placed, namely, that they should be sure to have to account to
considerate and fair persons, but not to have to account to
inconsiderate and unfair ones. At present the Government which
negotiates a treaty can hardly be said to be accountable to any one. It
is sure to be subjected to vague censure. Benjamin Franklin said, "I
have never known a peace made, even the most advantageous, that was not
censured as inadequate, and the makers condemned as injudicious or
corrupt. 'Blessed are the peace-makers' is, I suppose, to be understood
in the other world, for in this they are frequently cursed." And this
is very often the view taken now in England of treaties. There being
nothing practical in the Opposition--nothing likely to hamper them
hereafter--the leaders of Opposition are nearly sure to suggest every
objection. The thing is done and cannot be undone, and the most natural
wish of the Opposition leaders is to prove that if they had been in
office, and it therefore had been theirs to do it, they could have done
it much better. On the other hand, it is quite possible that there may
be no real criticism on a treaty at all; or the treaty has been made by
the Government, and as it cannot be unmade by any one, the Opposition
may not think it worth while to say much about it. The Government,
therefore, is never certain of any criticism; on the contrary, it has a
good chance of escaping criticism; but if there be any criticism the
Government must expect it to be bitter, sharp, and captious--made as an
irresponsible objector would make it, and not as a responsible
statesman, who may have to deal with a difficulty if he make it, and
therefore will be cautious how he says anything which may make it.

This is what happens in common cases; and in the uncommon--the
ninety-ninth case in a hundred--in which the Opposition hoped to turn
out the Government because of the alleged badness of the treaty they
have made, the criticism is sure to be of the most undesirable
character, and to say what is most offensive to foreign nations. All
the practised acumen of anti-Government writers and speakers is sure to
be engaged in proving that England has been imposed upon--that, as was
said in one case, "The moral and the intellectual qualities have been
divided; that our negotiation had the moral, and the negotiation on the
other side the intellectual," and so on. The whole pitch of party
malice is then expended, because there is nothing to check the party in
opposition. The treaty has been made, and though it may be censured,
and the party which made it ousted, yet the difficulty it was meant to
cure is cured, and the opposing party, if it takes office, will not
have that difficulty to deal with.

In abstract theory these defects in our present practice would seem
exceedingly great, but in practice they are not so. English statesmen
and English parties have really a great patriotism; they can rarely be
persuaded even by their passions or their interest to do anything
contrary to the real interest of England, or anything which would lower
England in the eyes of foreign nations. And they would seriously hurt
themselves if they did. But still these are the real tendencies of our
present practice, and these are only prevented by qualities in the
nation and qualities in our statesmen, which will just as much exist if
we change our practice.

It certainly would be in many ways advantageous to change it. If we
require that in some form the assent of Parliament shall be given to
such treaties, we should have a real discussion prior to the making of
such treaties. We should have the reasons for the treaty plainly
stated, and also the reasons against it. At present, as we have seen,
the discussion is unreal. The thing is done and cannot be altered; and
what is said often ought not to be said because it is captious, and
what is not said ought as often to be said because it is material. We
should have a manlier and plainer way of dealing with foreign policy,
if Ministers were obliged to explain clearly their foreign contracts
before they were valid, just as they have to explain their domestic
proposals before they can become laws. The objections to this are, as
far as I know, three, and three only.

First, that it would not be always desirable for Ministers to state
clearly the motives which induced them to agree to foreign compacts.
"Treaties," it is said, "are in one great respect different from laws,
they concern not only the Government which binds, the nation so bound,
but a third party too--a foreign country--and the feelings of that
country are to be considered as well as our own. And that foreign
country will, probably, in the present state of the world be a despotic
one, where discussion is not practised, where it is not understood,
where the expressions of different speakers are not accurately weighed,
where undue offence may easily be given." This objection might be
easily avoided by requiring that the discussion upon treaties in
Parliament like that discussion in the American Senate should be "in
secret session," and that no report should be published of it. But I
should, for my own part, be rather disposed to risk a public debate.
Despotic nations now cannot understand England; it is to them an
anomaly "chartered by Providence"; they have been time out of mind
puzzled by its institutions, vexed at its statesmen, and angry at its
newspapers. A little more of such perplexity and such vexation does not
seem to me a great evil. And if it be meant, as it often is meant, that
the whole truth as to treaties cannot be spoken out, I answer, that
neither can the whole truth as to laws. All important laws affect large
"vested interests"; they touch great sources of political strength; and
these great interests require to be treated as delicately, and with as
nice a manipulation of language, as the feelings of any foreign
country. A Parliamentary Minister is a man trained by elaborate
practice not to blurt out crude things, and an English Parliament is an
assembly which particularly dislikes anything gauche or anything
imprudent. They would still more dislike it if it hurt themselves and
the country as well as the speaker.

I am, too, disposed to deny entirely that there can be any treaty for
which adequate reasons cannot be given to the English people, which the
English people ought to make. A great deal of the reticence of
diplomacy had, I think history shows, much better be spoken out. The
worst families are those in which the members never really speak their
minds to one another; they maintain an atmosphere of unreality, and
every one always lives in an atmosphere of suppressed ill-feeling. It
is the same with nations. The parties concerned would almost always be
better for hearing the substantial reasons which induced the
negotiators to make the treaty, and the negotiators would do their work
much better, for half the ambiguities in treaties are caused by the
negotiators not liking the fact or not taking the pains to put their
own meaning distinctly before their own minds. And they would be
obliged to make it plain if they had to defend it and argue on it
before a great assembly.

Secondly, it may be objected to the change suggested that Parliament is
not always sitting, and that if treaties required its assent, it might
have to be sometimes summoned out of season, or the treaties would have
to be delayed. And this is as far as it goes a just objection, but I do
not imagine that it goes far. The great bulk of treaties could wait a
little without harm, and in the very few cases when urgent haste is
necessary, an autumn session of Parliament could well be justified, for
the occasion must be of grave and critical importance.

Thirdly, it may be said that if we required the consent of both Houses
of Parliament to foreign treaties before they were valid we should much
augment the power of the House of Lords. And this is also, I think, a
just objection as far as it goes. The House of Lords, as it cannot turn
out the Ministry for making treaties, has in no case a decisive weight
in foreign policy, though its debates on them are often excellent; and
there is a real danger at present in giving it such weight. They are
not under the same guidance as the House of Commons. In the House of
Commons, of necessity, the Ministry has a majority, and the majority
will agree to the treaties the leaders have made if they fairly can.
They will not be anxious to disagree with them. But the majority of the
House of Lords may always be, and has lately been generally an
opposition majority, and therefore the treaty may be submitted to
critics exactly pledged to opposite views. It might be like submitting
the design of an architect known to hold "mediaeval principles" to a
committee wedded to "classical principles".

Still, upon the whole, I think the augmentation of the power of the
peers might be risked without real fear of serious harm. Our present
practice, as has been explained, only works because of the good sense
of those by whom it is worked, and the new practice would have to rely
on a similar good sense and practicality too. The House of Lords must
deal with the assent to treaties as they do with the assent to laws;
they must defer to the voice of the country and the authority of the
Commons even in cases where their own judgment might guide them
otherwise. In very vital treaties probably, being Englishmen, they
would be of the same mind as the rest of Englishmen. If in such cases
they showed a reluctance to act as the people wished, they would have
the same lesson taught them as on vital and exciting questions of
domestic legislation, and the case is not so likely to happen, for on
these internal and organic questions the interest and the feeling of
the peers is often presumably opposed to that of other classes--they
may be anxious not to relinquish the very power which other classes are
anxious to acquire; but in foreign policy there is no similar
antagonism of interest--a peer and a non-peer have presumably in that
matter the same interest and the same wishes.

Probably, if it were considered to be desirable to give to Parliament a
more direct control over questions of foreign policy than it possesses
now, the better way would be not to require a formal vote to the treaty
clause by clause. This would entail too much time, and would lead to
unnecessary changes in minor details. It would be enough to let the
treaty be laid upon the table of both Houses, say for fourteen days,
and to acquire validity unless objected to by one House or other before
that interval had expired.


II.

This is all which I think I need say on the domestic events which have
changed, or suggested changes, in the English Constitution since this
book was written. But there are also some foreign events which have
illustrated it, and of these I should like to say a few words.

Naturally, the most striking of these illustrative changes comes from
France. Since 1789 France has always been trying political experiments,
from which others may profit much, though as yet she herself has
profited little. She is now trying one singularly illustrative of the
English Constitution. When the first edition of this book was published
I had great difficulty in persuading many people that it was possible
in a non-monarchical State, for the real chief of the practical
executive--the Premier as we should call him--to be nominated and to be
removable by the vote of the National Assembly. The United States and
its copies were the only present and familiar Republics, and in these
the system was exactly opposite. The executive was there appointed by
the people as the legislature was too. No conspicuous example of any
other sort of Republic then existed. But now France has given an
example--M. Thiers is (with one exception) just the chef du pouvoir
executif that I endeavoured more than once in this book to describe. He
is appointed by and is removable by the Assembly. He comes down and
speaks in it just as our Premier does; he is responsible for managing
it just as our Premier is. No one can any longer doubt the possibility
of a republic in which the executive and the legislative authorities
were united and fixed; no one can assert such union to be the
incommunicable attribute of a Constitutional Monarchy. But,
unfortunately, we can as yet only infer from this experiment that such
a Constitution is possible; we cannot as yet say whether it will be bad
or good. The circumstances are very peculiar, and that in three ways.
First, the trial of a specially Parliamentary Republic, of a Republic
where Parliament appoints the Minister, is made in a nation which has,
to say the least of it, no peculiar aptitude for Parliamentary
Government; which has possibly a peculiar inaptitude for it. In the
last but one of these essays I have tried to describe one of the mental
conditions of Parliamentary Government, which I call "rationality," by
which I do not mean reasoning power, but rather the power of hearing
the reasons of others, of comparing them quietly with one's own
reasons, and then being guided by the result. But a French Assembly is
not easy to reason with. Every assembly is divided into parties and
into sections of parties, and in France each party, almost every
section of a party, begins not to clamour but to scream, and to scream
as only Frenchmen can, as soon as it hears anything which it
particularly dislikes. With an Assembly in this temper, real discussion
is impossible, and Parliamentary government is impossible too, because
the Parliament can neither choose men nor measures. The French
assemblies under the Restored Monarchy seem to have been quieter,
probably because being elected from a limited constituency they did not
contain so many sections of opinion; they had fewer irritants and fewer
species of irritability. But the assemblies of the '48 Republic were
disorderly in the extreme. I saw the last myself, and can certify that
steady discussion upon a critical point was not possible in it. There
was not an audience willing to hear. The Assembly now sitting at
Versailles is undoubtedly also, at times, most tumultuous, and a
Parliamentary government in which it governs must be under a peculiar
difficulty, because as a sovereign it is unstable, capricious, and
unruly.

The difficulty is the greater because there is no check, or little,
from the French nation upon the Assembly. The French, as a nation, do
not care for or appreciate Parliamentary government. I have endeavoured
to explain how difficult it is for inexperienced mankind to take to
such a government; how much more natural, that is, how much more easy
to uneducated men is loyalty to a monarch. A nation which does not
expect good from a Parliament, cannot check or punish a Parliament.
France expects, I fear, too little from her Parliaments ever to get
what she ought. Now that the suffrage is universal, the average
intellect and the average culture of the constituent bodies are
excessively low; and even such mind and culture as there is has long
been enslaved to authority; the French peasant cares more for standing
well with his present prefet than for anything else whatever; he is far
too ignorant to check and watch his Parliament, and far too timid to
think of doing either if the executive authority nearest to him does
not like it. The experiment of a strictly Parliamentary Republic--of a
Republic where the Parliament appoints the executive--is being tried in
France at an extreme disadvantage, because in France a Parliament is
unusually likely to be bad, and unusually likely also to be free enough
to show its badness. Secondly, the present polity of France is not a
copy of the whole effective part of the British Constitution, but only
a part of it. By our Constitution nominally the Queen, but really the
Prime Minister, has the power of dissolving the Assembly. But M. Thiers
has no such power; and therefore, under ordinary circumstances, I
believe, the policy would soon become unmanageable. The result would
be, as I have tried to explain, that the Assembly would be always
changing its Ministry, that having no reason to fear the penalty which
that change so often brings in England, they would be ready to make it
once a month. Caprice is the characteristic vice of miscellaneous
assemblies, and without some check their selection would be unceasingly
mutable. This peculiar danger of the present Constitution of France has
however been prevented by its peculiar circumstances. The Assembly have
not been inclined to remove M. Thiers, because in their lamentable
present position they could not replace M. Thiers. He has a monopoly of
the necessary reputation. It is the Empire--the Empire which he always
opposed--that has done him this kindness. For twenty years no great
political reputation could arise in France. The Emperor governed and no
one member could show a capacity for government. M. Rouher, though of
vast real ability, was in the popular idea only the Emperor's agent;
and even had it been otherwise, M. Rouher, the one great man of
Imperialism, could not have been selected as a head of the Government,
at a moment of the greatest reaction against the Empire. Of the chiefs
before the twenty years' silence, of the eminent men known to be able
to handle Parliaments and to govern Parliaments, M. Thiers was the only
one still physically able to begin again to do so. The miracle is, that
at seventy-four even he should still be able. As no other great chief
of the Parliament regime existed, M. Thiers is not only the best
choice, but the only choice. If he were taken away, it would be most
difficult to make any other choice, and that difficulty keeps him where
he is. At every crisis the Assembly feels that after M. Thiers "the
deluge," and he lives upon that feeling. A change of the President,
though legally simple, is in practice all but impossible; because all
know that such a change might be a change, not only of the President,
but of much more too: that very probably it might be a change of the
polity--that it might bring in a Monarchy or an Empire.

Lastly, by a natural consequence of the position, M. Thiers does not
govern as a Parliamentary Premier governs. He is not, he boasts that he
is not, the head of a party. On the contrary, being the one person
essential to all parties, he selects Ministers from all parties, he
constructs a Cabinet in which no one Minister agrees with any other in
anything, and with all the members of which he himself frequently
disagrees. The selection is quite in his hand. Ordinarily a
Parliamentary Premier cannot choose; he is brought in by a party; he is
maintained in office by a party; and that party requires that as they
aid him, he shall aid them; that as they give him the very best thing
in the State, he shall give them the next best things. But M. Thiers is
under no such restriction. He can choose as he likes, and does choose.
Neither in the selection of his Cabinet nor in the management of the
Chamber, is M. Thiers guided as a similar person in common
circumstances would have to be guided. He is the exception of a moment;
he is not the example of a lasting condition.

For these reasons, though we may use the present Constitution of France
as a useful aid to our imaginations, in conceiving of a purely
Parliamentary Republic, of a monarchy minus the monarch, we must not
think of it as much more. It is too singular in its nature and too
peculiar in its accidents to be a guide to anything except itself.

In this essay I made many remarks on the American Constitution, in
comparison with the English; and as to the American Constitution we
have had a whole world of experience since I first wrote. My great
object was to contrast the office of President as an executive officer
and to compare it with that of a Prime Minister; and I devoted much
space to showing that in one principal respect the English system is by
far the best. The English Premier being appointed by the selection, and
being removable at the pleasure, of the preponderant Legislative
Assembly, is sure to be able to rely on that Assembly. If he wants
legislation to aid his policy he can obtain that legislation; he can
carry out that policy. But the American President has no similar
security. He is elected in one way, at one time, and Congress (no
matter which House) is elected in another way, at another time. The two
have nothing to bind them together, and in matter of fact, they
continually disagree.

This was written in the time of Mr. Lincoln, when Congress, the
President, and all the North were united as one man in the war against
the South. There was then no patent instance of mere disunion. But
between the time when the essays were first written in the Fortnightly,
and their subsequent junction into a book, Mr. Lincoln was
assassinated, and Mr. Johnson, the Vice-President, became President,
and so continued for nearly four years. At such a time the
characteristic evils of the Presidential system were shown most
conspicuously. The President and the Assembly, so far from being (as it
is essential to good government that they should be) on terms of close
union, were not on terms of common courtesy. So far from being capable
of a continuous and concerted co-operation they were all the while
trying to thwart one another. He had one plan for the pacification of
the South and they another; they would have nothing to say to his
plans, and he vetoed their plans as long as the Constitution permitted,
and when they were, in spite of him, carried, he, as far as he could
(and this was very much), embarrassed them in action. The quarrel in
most countries would have gone beyond the law, and come to blows; even
in America, the most law-loving of countries, it went as far as
possible within the law. Mr. Johnson described the most popular branch
of the legislature--the House of Representatives--as a body "hanging on
the verge of government"; and that House impeached him criminally, in
the hope that in that way they might get rid of him civilly. Nothing
could be so conclusive against the American Constitution, as a
Constitution, as that incident. A hostile legislature and a hostile
executive were so tied together, that the legislature tried, and tried
in vain, to rid itself of the executive by accusing it of illegal
practices. The legislature was so afraid of the President's legal power
that it unfairly accused him of acting beyond the law. And the blame
thus cast on the American Constitution is so much praise to be given to
the American political character.

Few nations, perhaps scarcely any nation, could have borne such a trial
so easily and so perfectly. This was the most striking instance of
disunion between the President and the Congress that has ever yet
occurred, and which probably will ever occur. Probably for very many
years the United States will have great and painful reason to remember
that at the moment of all their history, when it was most important to
them to collect and concentrate all the strength and wisdom of their
policy on the pacification of the South, that policy was divided by a
strife in the last degree unseemly and degrading. But it will be for a
competent historian hereafter to trace out this accurately and in
detail; the time is yet too recent, and I cannot pretend that I know
enough to do so. I cannot venture myself to draw the full lessons from
these events; I can only predict that when they are drawn, those
lessons will be most important, and most interesting. There is,
however, one series of events which have happened in America since the
beginning of the Civil War, and since the first publication of these
essays, on which I should wish to say something in detail--I mean the
financial events. These lie within the scope of my peculiar studies,
and it is comparatively easy to judge of them, since whatever may be
the case with refined statistical reasoning, the great results of money
matters speak to and interest all mankind. And every incident in this
part of American financial history exemplifies the contrast between a
Parliamentary and Presidential government.

The distinguishing quality of Parliamentary government is, that in each
stage of a public transaction there is a discussion; that the public
assist at this discussion; that it can, through Parliament, turn out an
administration which is not doing as it likes, and can put in an
administration which will do as it likes. But the characteristic of a
Presidential government is, in a multitude of cases, that there is no
such discussion; that when there is a discussion the fate of Government
does not turn upon it, and, therefore, the people do not attend to it;
that upon the whole the administration itself is pretty much doing as
it likes, and neglecting as it likes, subject always to the check that
it must not too much offend the mass of the nation. The nation commonly
does not attend, but if by gigantic blunders you make it attend, it
will remember it and turn you out when its time comes; it will show you
that your power is short, and so on the instant weaken that power; it
will make your present life in office unbearable and uncomfortable by
the hundred modes in which a free people can, without ceasing, act upon
the rulers which it elected yesterday, and will have to reject or
re-elect to-morrow.  In finance the most striking effect in America
has, on the first view of it, certainly been good. It has enabled the
Government to obtain and to keep a vast surplus of revenue over
expenditure. Even before the Civil War it did this--from 1837 to 1857.
Mr. Wells tells us that, strange as it may seem, "there was not a
single year in which the unexpended balance in the National
Treasury--derived from various sources--at the end of the year, was not
in excess of the total expenditure of the preceding year; while in not
a few years the unexpended balance was absolutely greater than the sum
of the entire expenditure of the twelve months preceding". But this
history before the war is nothing to what has happened since. The
following are the surpluses of revenue over expenditure since the end
of the Civil War:--

  Year ending June 30.           Surplus. (pounds)

  1866 .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .    5,593,000
  1867 .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   21,586,000
  1868 .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .    4,242,000
  1869 .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .    7,418,000
  1870 .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   18,627,000
  1871 .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   16,712,000

No one who knows anything of the working of Parliamentary government,
will for a moment imagine that any Parliament would have allowed any
executive to keep a surplus of this magnitude. In England, after the
French war, the Government of that day, which had brought it to a happy
end, which had the glory of Waterloo, which was in consequence
exceedingly strong, which had besides elements of strength from close
boroughs and Treasury influence such as certainly no Government has
ever had since, and such perhaps as no Government ever had before--that
Government proposed to keep a moderate surplus and to apply it to the
reduction of the debt, but even this the English Parliament would not
endure. The administration with all its power derived both from good
and evil had to yield; the income tax was abolished, with it went the
surplus, and with the surplus all chance of any considerable reduction
of the debt for that time. In truth taxation is so painful that in a
sensitive community which has strong organs of expression and action,
the maintenance of a great surplus is excessively difficult. The
Opposition will always say that it is unnecessary, is uncalled for, is
injudicious; the cry will be echoed in every constituency; there will
be a series of large meetings in the great cities; even in the smaller
constituencies there will mostly be smaller meetings; every member of
Parliament will be pressed upon by those who elect him; upon this point
there will be no distinction between town and country, the country
gentleman and the farmer disliking high taxes as much as any in the
towns. To maintain a great surplus by heavy taxes to pay off debt has
never yet in this country been possible, and to maintain a surplus of
the American magnitude would be plainly impossible.

Some part of the difference between England and America arises
undoubtedly not from political causes but from economical. America is
not a country sensitive to taxes; no great country has perhaps ever
been so unsensitive in this respect; certainly she is far less
sensitive than England. In reality America is too rich; daily industry
there is too common, too skilful, and too productive, for her to care
much for fiscal burdens. She is applying all the resources of science
and skill and trained labour, which have been in long ages painfully
acquired in old countries, to develop with great speed the richest soil
and the richest mines of new countries; and the result is untold
wealth. Even under a Parliamentary government such a community could
and would bear taxation much more easily than Englishmen ever would.

But difference of physical character in this respect is of little
moment in comparison with difference of political constitution. If
America was under a Parliamentary government, she would soon be
convinced that in maintaining this great surplus and in paying this
high taxation she would be doing herself great harm. She is not
performing a great duty, but perpetrating a great injustice. She is
injuring posterity by crippling and displacing industry, far more than
she is aiding it by reducing the taxes it will have to pay. In the
first place, the maintenance of the present high taxation compels the
retention of many taxes which are contrary to the maxims of free-trade.
Enormous customs duties are necessary, and it would be all but
impossible to impose equal excise duties even if the Americans desired
it. In consequence, besides what the Americans pay to the Government,
they are paying a great deal to some of their own citizens, and so are
rearing a set of industries which never ought to have existed, which
are bad speculations at present because other industries would have
paid better, and which may cause a great loss out of pocket hereafter
when the debt is paid off and the fostering tax withdrawn. Then
probably industry will return to its natural channel, the artificial
trade will be first depressed, then discontinued, and the fixed capital
employed in the trade will all be depreciated and much of it be
worthless. Secondly, all taxes on trade and manufacture are injurious
in various ways to them. You cannot put on a great series of such
duties without cramping trade in a hundred ways and without diminishing
their productiveness exceedingly. America is now working in heavy
fetters, and it would probably be better for her to lighten those
fetters even though a generation or two should have to pay rather
higher taxes. Those generations would really benefit, because they
would be so much richer that the slightly increased cost of government
would never be perceived. At any rate, under a Parliamentary government
this doctrine would have been incessantly inculcated; a whole party
would have made it their business to preach it, would have made
incessant small motions in Parliament about it, which is the way to
popularise their view. And in the end I do not doubt that they would
have prevailed. They would have had to teach a lesson both pleasant and
true, and such lessons are soon learned. On the whole, therefore, the
result of the comparison is that a Presidential government makes it
much easier than the Parliamentary to maintain a great surplus of
income over expenditure, but that it does not give the same facility
for examining whether it be good or not good to maintain a surplus,
and, therefore, that it works blindly, maintaining surpluses when they
do extreme harm just as much as when they are very beneficial.

In this point the contrast of Presidential with Parliamentary
government is mixed; one of the defects of Parliamentary government
probably is the difficulty under it of maintaining a surplus revenue to
discharge debt, and this defect Presidential government escapes, though
at the cost of being likely to maintain that surplus upon inexpedient
occasions as well as upon expedient. But in all other respects a
Parliamentary government has in finance an unmixed advantage over the
Presidential in the incessant discussion. Though in one single case it
produces evil as well as good, in most cases it produces good only. And
three of these cases are illustrated by recent American experience.
First, as Mr. Goldwin Smith--no unfavourable judge of anything
American--justly said some years since, the capital error made by the
United States Government was the "Legal Tender Act," as it is called,
by which it made inconvertible paper notes issued by the Treasury the
sole circulating medium of the country. The temptation to do this was
very great, because it gave at once a great war fund when it was
needed, and with no pain to any one. If the notes of a Government
supersede the metallic currency medium of a country to the extent of
$80,000,000, this is equivalent to a recent loan of $80,000,000 to the
Government for all purposes within the country. Whenever the precious
metals are not required, and for domestic purposes in such a case they
are not required, notes will buy what the Government want, and it can
buy to the extent of its issue. But, like all easy expedients out of a
great difficulty, it is accompanied by the greatest evils; if it had
not been so, it would have been the regular device in such cases, and
the difficulty would have been no difficulty at all; there would have
been a known easy way out of it. As is well known, inconvertible paper
issued by Government is sure to be issued in great quantities, as the
American currency soon was; it is sure to be depreciated as against
coin; it is sure to disturb values and to derange markets; it is
certain to defraud the lender; it is certain to give the borrower more
than he ought to have. In the case of America there was a further evil.
Being a new country, she ought in her times of financial want to borrow
of old countries; but the old countries were frightened by the probable
issue of unlimited inconvertible paper, and they would not lend a
shilling. Much more than the mercantile credit of America was thus
lost. The great commercial houses in England are the most natural and
most effectual conveyers of intelligence from other countries to
Europe. If they had been financially interested in giving in a sound
report as to the progress of the war, a sound report we should have
had. But as the Northern States raised no loans in Lombard Street (and
could raise none because of their vicious paper money), Lombard Street
did not care about them, and England was very imperfectly informed of
the progress of the civil struggle, and on the whole matter, which was
then new and very complex, England had to judge without having her
usual materials for judgment, and (since the guidance of the "City" on
political matter is very quietly and imperceptibly given) without
knowing she had not those materials. Of course, this error might have
been committed, and perhaps would have been committed under a
Parliamentary government. But if it had, its effects would ere long
have been thoroughly searched into and effectually frustrated. The
whole force of the greatest inquiring machine and the greatest
discussing machine which the world has ever known would have been
directed to this subject. In a year or two the American public would
have had it forced upon them in every form till they must have
comprehended it. But under the Presidential form of government, and
owing to the inferior power of generating discussion, the information
given to the American people has been imperfect in the extreme. And in
consequence, after nearly ten years of painful experience, they do not
now understand how much they have suffered from their inconvertible
currency.

But the mode in which the Presidential government of America managed
its taxation during the Civil War, is even a more striking example of
its defects. Mr. Wells tells us:--

"In the outset all direct or internal taxation was avoided, there
having been apparently an apprehension on the part of Congress, that
inasmuch as the people had never been accustomed to it, and as all
machinery for assessment and collection was wholly wanting, its
adoption would create discontent, and thereby interfere with a vigorous
prosecution of hostilities. Congress, therefore, confined itself at
first to the enactment of measures looking to an increase of revenue
from the increase of indirect taxes upon imports; and it was not until
four months after the actual outbreak of hostilities that a direct tax
of $20,000,000 per annum was apportioned among the States, and an
income tax of 3 per cent. on the excess of all incomes over $800 was
provided for; the first being made to take effect practically eight,
and the second ten months after date of enactment. Such laws of course
took effect, and became immediately operative in the loyal States only,
and produced but comparatively little revenue; and although the range
of taxation was soon extended, the whole receipts from all sources by
the Government for the second year of the war, from excise, income,
stamp, and all other internal taxes, were less than $42,000,000; and
that, too, at a time when the expenditures were in excess $60,000,000
per month, or at the rate of over $700,000,000 per annum. And as
showing how novel was this whole subject of direct and internal
taxation to the people, and how completely the Government officials
were lacking in all experience in respect to it, the following incident
may be noted. The Secretary of the Treasury, in his report for 1863,
stated that, with a view of determining his resources, he employed a
very competent person, with the aid of practical men, to estimate the
probable amount of revenue to be derived from each department of
internal taxation for the previous year. The estimate arrived at was
$85,000,000, but the actual receipts were only $37,000,000."

Now, no doubt, this might have happened under a Parliamentary
government. But, then, many members of Parliament, the entire
Opposition in Parliament, would have been active to unravel the matter.
All the principles of finance would have been worked and propounded.
The light would have come from above, not from below--it would have
come from Parliament to the nation instead of from the nation to
Parliament But exactly the reverse happened in America. Mr. Wells goes
on to say:--

"The people of the loyal States were, however, more determined and in
earnest in respect to this matter of taxation than were their rulers;
and before long the popular discontent at the existing state of things
was openly manifest. Every where the opinion was expressed that
taxation in all possible forms should immediately, and to the largest
extent, be made effective and imperative; and Congress spurred up, and
right fully relying on public sentiment to sustain their action, at
last took up the matter resolutely and in earnest, and devised and
inaugurated a system of internal and direct taxation, which for its
universality and peculiarities has probably no parallel in anything
which has heretofore been recorded in civil history, or is likely to be
experienced hereafter. The one necessity of the situation was revenue,
and to obtain it speedily and in large amounts through taxation the
only principle recognised--if it can be called a principle--was akin to
that recommended to the traditionary Irishman on his visit to
Donnybrook Fair, 'Wherever you see a head hit it'. Wherever you find an
article, a product, a trade, a profession, or a source of income, tax
it! And so an edict went forth to this effect, and the people
cheerfully submitted. Incomes under $5,000 were taxed 5 per cent., with
an exemption of $600 and house rent actually paid; these exemptions
being allowed on this ground, that they represented an amount
sufficient at the time to enable a small family to procure the bare
necessaries of life, and thus take out from the operation of the law
all those who were dependent upon each day's earnings to supply each
day's needs. Incomes in excess of $5,000 and not in excess of $10,000
were taxed 2 1/2 per cent. in addition; and incomes over $10,000 5 per
cent. additional, without any abeyance or exemptions whatever."

Now this is all contrary to and worse than what would have happened
under a Parliamentary government. The delay to tax would not have
occurred under it: the movement by the country to get taxation would
never have been necessary under it. The excessive taxation accordingly
imposed would not have been permitted under it. The last point I think
I need not labour at length. The evils of a bad tax are quite sure to
be pressed upon the ears of Parliament in season and out of season; the
few persons who have to pay it are thoroughly certain to make
themselves heard. The sort of taxation tried in America, that of taxing
everything, and seeing what every thing would yield, could not have
been tried under a Government delicately and quickly sensitive to
public opinion.

I do not apologise for dwelling at length upon these points, for the
subject is one of transcendent importance. The practical choice of
first-rate nations is between the Presidential government and the
Parliamentary; no State can be first-rate which has not a government by
discussion, and those are the only two existing species of that
government. It is between them that a nation which has to choose its
government must choose. And nothing therefore can be more important
than to compare the two, and to decide upon the testimony of
experience, and by facts, which of them is the better.

THE POPLARS, WIMBLEDON:

June 20, 1872.




NO. II.

THE CABINET.


"On all great subjects," says Mr. Mill, "much remains to be said," and
of none is this more true than of the English Constitution. The
literature which has accumulated upon it is huge. But an observer who
looks at the living reality will wonder at the contrast to the paper
description. He will see in the life much which is not in the books;
and he will not find in the rough practice many refinements of the
literary theory.

It was natural--perhaps inevitable--that such an under growth of
irrelevant ideas should gather round the British Constitution. Language
is the tradition of nations; each generation describes what it sees,
but it uses words transmitted from the past. When a great entity like
the British Constitution has continued in connected outward sameness,
but hidden inner change, for many ages, every generation inherits a
series of inapt words--of maxims once true, but of which the truth is
ceasing or has ceased. As a man's family go on muttering in his
maturity incorrect phrases derived from a just observation of his early
youth, so, in the full activity of an historical constitution, its
subjects repeat phrases true in the time of their fathers, and
inculcated by those fathers, but now true no longer. Or, if I may say
so, an ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who
still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth:
what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered.

There are two descriptions of the English Constitution which have
exercised immense influence, but which are erroneous. First, it is laid
down as a principle of the English polity, that in it the legislative,
the executive, and the judicial powers are quite divided--that each is
entrusted to a separate person or set of persons--that no one of these
can at all interfere with the work of the other. There has been much
eloquence expended in explaining how the rough genius of the English
people, even in the middle ages, when it was especially rude, carried
into life and practice that elaborate division of functions which
philosophers had suggested on paper, but which they had hardly hoped to
see except on paper.

Secondly, it is insisted that the peculiar excellence of the British
Constitution lies in a balanced union of three powers. It is said that
the monarchical element, the aristocratic element, and the democratic
element, have each a share in the supreme sovereignty, and that the
assent of all three is necessary to the action of that sovereignty.
Kings, lords, and commons, by this theory, are alleged to be not only
the outward form, but the inner moving essence, the vitality of the
Constitution. A great theory, called the theory of "Checks and
Balances," pervades an immense part of political literature, and much
of it is collected from or supported by English experience. Monarchy,
it is said, has some faults, some bad tendencies, aristocracy others,
democracy, again, others; but England has shown that a Government can
be constructed in which these evil tendencies exactly check, balance,
and destroy one another--in which a good whole is constructed not
simply in spite of, but by means of, the counteracting defects of the
constituent parts.

Accordingly, it is believed that the principal characteristics of the
English Constitution are inapplicable in countries where the materials
for a monarchy or an aristocracy do not exist. That Constitution is
conceived to be the best imaginable use of the political elements which
the great majority of States in modern Europe inherited from the
mediaeval period. It is believed that out of these materials nothing
better can be made than the English Constitution; but it is also
believed that the essential parts of the English Constitution cannot be
made except from these materials. Now these elements are the accidents
of a period and a region; they belong only to one or two centuries in
human history, and to a few countries. The United States could not have
become monarchical, even if the Constitutional Convention had decreed
it, even if the component States had ratified it. The mystic reverence,
the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are
imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any
people. These semi-filial feelings in Government are inherited just as
the true filial feelings in common life. You might as well adopt a
father as make a monarchy: the special sentiment belonging to the one
is as incapable of voluntary creation as the peculiar affection
belonging to the other. If the practical part of the English
Constitution could only be made out of a curious accumulation of
mediaeval materials, its interest would be half historical, and its
imitability very confined.

No one can approach to an understanding of the English institutions, or
of others, which, being the growth of many centuries, exercise a wide
sway over mixed populations, unless he divide them into two classes. In
such constitutions there are two parts (not indeed separable with
microscopic accuracy, for the genius of great affairs abhors nicety of
division): first, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the
population--the DIGNIFIED parts, if I may so call them; and next, the
EFFICIENT parts--those by which it, in fact, works and rules. There are
two great objects which every constitution must attain to be
successful, which every old and celebrated one must have wonderfully
achieved: every constitution must first GAIN authority, and then USE
authority; it must first win the loyalty and confidence of mankind, and
then employ that homage in the work of government.

There are indeed practical men who reject the dignified parts of
Government. They say, we want only to attain results, to do business: a
constitution is a collection of political means for political ends, and
if you admit that any part of a constitution does no business, or that
a simpler machine would do equally well what it does, you admit that
this part of the constitution, however dignified or awful it may be, is
nevertheless in truth useless. And other reasoners, who distrust this
bare philosophy, have propounded subtle arguments to prove that these
dignified parts of old Governments are cardinal components of the
essential apparatus, great pivots of substantial utility; and so they
manufactured fallacies which the plainer school have well exposed. But
both schools are in error. The dignified parts of Government are those
which bring it force--which attract its motive power. The efficient
parts only employ that power. The comely parts of a Government HAVE
need, for they are those upon which its vital strength depends. They
may not do anything definite that a simpler polity would not do better;
but they are the preliminaries, the needful prerequisites of ALL work.
They raise the army, though they do not win the battle.

Doubtless, if all subjects of the same Government only thought of what
was useful to them, and if they all thought the same thing useful, and
all thought that same thing could be attained in the same way, the
efficient members of a constitution would suffice, and no impressive
adjuncts would be needed. But the world in which we live is organised
far otherwise.

The most strange fact, though the most certain in nature, is the
unequal development of the human race. If we look back to the early
ages of mankind, such as we seem in the faint distance to see them--if
we call up the image of those dismal tribes in lake villages, or on
wretched beaches--scarcely equal to the commonest material needs,
cutting down trees slowly and painfully with stone tools, hardly
resisting the attacks of huge, fierce animals--without culture, without
leisure, without poetry, almost without thought--destitute of morality,
with only a sort of magic for religion; and if we compare that imagined
life with the actual life of Europe now, we are overwhelmed at the wide
contrast--we can scarcely conceive ourselves to be of the same race as
those in the far distance. There used to be a notion--not so much
widely asserted as deeply implanted, rather pervadingly latent than
commonly apparent in political philosophy--that in a little while,
perhaps ten years or so, all human beings might, without extraordinary
appliances, be brought to the same level. But now, when we see by the
painful history of mankind at what point we began, by what slow toil,
what favourable circumstances, what accumulated achievements, civilised
man has become at all worthy in any degree so to call himself--when we
realise the tedium of history and the painfulness of results--our
perceptions are sharpened as to the relative steps of our long and
gradual progress. We have in a great community like England crowds of
people scarcely more civilised than the majority of two thousand years
ago; we have others, even more numerous, such as the best people were a
thousand years since. The lower orders, the middle orders, are still,
when tried by what is the standard of the educated "ten thousand,"
narrow-minded, unintelligent, incurious. It is useless to pile up
abstract words. Those who doubt should go out into their kitchens. Let
an accomplished man try what seems to him most obvious, most certain,
most palpable in intellectual matters, upon the housemaid and the
footman, and he will find that what he says seems unintelligible,
confused, and erroneous--that his audience think him mad and wild when
he is speaking what is in his own sphere of thought the dullest
platitude of cautious soberness. Great communities are like great
mountains--they have in them the primary, secondary, and tertiary
strata of human progress; the characteristics of the lower regions
resemble the life of old times rather than the present life of the
higher regions. And a philosophy which does not ceaselessly remember,
which does not continually obtrude, the palpable differences of the
various parts, will be a theory radically false, because it has omitted
a capital reality--will be a theory essentially misleading, because it
will lead men to expect what does not exist, and not to anticipate that
which they will find.

Every one knows these plain facts, but by no means every one has traced
their political importance. When a State is constituted thus, it is not
true that the lower classes will be wholly absorbed in the useful; on
the contrary, they do not like anything so poor. No orator ever made an
impression by appealing to men as to their plainest physical wants,
except when he could allege that those wants were caused by some one's
tyranny. But thousands have made the greatest impression by appealing
to some vague dream of glory, or empire, or nationality. The ruder sort
of men--that is, men at ONE stage of rudeness--will sacrifice all they
hope for, all they have, THEMSELVES, for what is called an idea--for
some attraction which seems to transcend reality, which aspires to
elevate men by an interest higher, deeper, wider than that of ordinary
life. But this order of men are uninterested in the plain, palpable
ends of government; they do not prize them; they do not in the least
comprehend how they should be attained. It is very natural, therefore,
that the most useful parts of the structure of government should by no
means be those which excite the most reverence. The elements which
excite the most easy reverence will be the THEATRICAL elements--those
which appeal to the senses, which claim to be embodiments of the
greatest human ideas, which boast in some cases of far more than human
origin. That which is mystic in its claims; that which is occult in its
mode of action; that which is brilliant to the eye; that which is seen
vividly for a moment, and then is seen no more; that which is hidden
and unhidden; that which is specious, and yet interesting, palpable in
its seeming, and yet professing to be more than palpable in its
results; this, howsoever its form may change, or however we may define
it or describe it, is the sort of thing--the only sort--which yet comes
home to the mass of men. So far from the dignified parts of a
constitution being necessarily the most useful, they are likely,
according to outside presumption, to be the least so; for they are
likely to be adjusted to the lowest orders--those likely to care least
and judge worst about what IS useful.

There is another reason which, in an old constitution like that of
England, is hardly less important. The most intellectual of men are
moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by
their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and
if it were not economised by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would
be null. We could not do every day out of our own heads all we have to
do. We should accomplish nothing, for all our energies would be
frittered away in minor attempts at petty improvement. One man, too,
would go off from the known track in one direction, and one in another;
so that when a crisis came requiring massed combination, no two men
would be near enough to act together. It is the dull traditional habit
of mankind that guides most men's actions, and is the steady frame in
which each new artist must set the picture that he paints. And all this
traditional part of human nature is, ex vi termini, most easily
impressed and acted on by that which is handed down. Other things being
equal, yesterday's institutions are by far the best for to-day; they
are the most ready, the most influential, the most easy to get obeyed,
the most likely to retain the reverence which they alone inherit, and
which every other must win. The most imposing institutions of mankind
are the oldest; and yet so changing is the world, so fluctuating are
its needs, so apt to lose inward force, though retaining out ward
strength, are its best instruments, that we must not expect the oldest
institutions to be now the most efficient. We must expect what is
venerable to acquire influence because of its inherent dignity; but we
must not expect it to use that influence so well as new creations apt
for the modern world, instinct with its spirit, and fitting closely to
its life.

The brief description of the characteristic merit of the English
Constitution is, that its dignified parts are very complicated and
somewhat imposing, very old and rather venerable; while its efficient
part, at least when in great and critical action, is decidedly simple
and rather modern. We have made, or rather stumbled on, a constitution
which--though full of every species of incidental defect, though of the
worst workmanship in all out-of-the-way matters of any constitution in
the world--yet has two capital merits: it contains a simple efficient
part which, on occasion, and when wanted, can work more simply and
easily, and better, than any instrument of government that has yet been
tried; and it contains likewise historical, complex, august, theatrical
parts, which it has inherited from a long past--which take the
multitude--which guide by an insensible but an omnipotent influence the
associations of its subjects. Its essence is strong with the strength
of modern simplicity; its exterior is august with the Gothic grandeur
of a more imposing age. Its simple essence may, mutatis mutandis, be
transplanted to many very various countries, but its august
outside--what most men think it is--is narrowly confined to nations
with an analogous history and similar political materials.

The efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described as
the close union, the nearly complete fusion, of the executive and
legislative powers. No doubt by the traditional theory, as it exists in
all the books, the goodness of our constitution consists in the entire
separation of the legislative and executive authorities, but in truth
its merit consists in their singular approximation. The connecting link
is the Cabinet. By that new word we mean a committee of the legislative
body selected to be the executive body. The legislature has many
committees, but this is its greatest. It chooses for this, its main
committee, the men in whom it has most confidence. It does not, it is
true, choose them directly; but it is nearly omnipotent in choosing
them indirectly. A century ago the Crown had a real choice of
Ministers, though it had no longer a choice in policy. During the long
reign of Sir R. Walpole he was obliged not only to manage Parliament
but to manage the palace. He was obliged to take care that some court
intrigue did not expel him from his place. The nation then selected the
English policy, but the Crown chose the English Ministers. They were
not only in name, as now, but in fact, the Queen's servants. Remnants,
important remnants, of this great prerogative still remain. The
discriminating favour of William IV. made Lord Melbourne head of the
Whig party when he was only one of several rivals. At the death of Lord
Palmerston it is very likely that the Queen may have the opportunity of
fairly choosing between two, if not three statesmen. But, as a rule,
the nominal Prime Minister is chosen by the legislature, and the real
Prime Minister for most purposes--the leader of the House of
Commons--almost without exception is so. There is nearly always some
one man plainly selected by the voice of the predominant party in the
predominant house of the legislature to head that party, and
consequently to rule the nation. We have in England an elective first
magistrate as truly as the Americans have an elective first magistrate.
The Queen is only at the head of the dignified part of the
Constitution. The Prime Minister is at the head of the efficient part.
The Crown is, according to the saying, the "fountain of honour"; but
the Treasury is the spring of business. Nevertheless, our first
magistrate differs from the American. He is not elected directly by the
people; he is elected by the representatives of the people. He is an
example of "double election". The legislature chosen, in name, to make
laws, in fact finds its principal business in making and in keeping an
executive.

The leading Minister so selected has to choose his associates, but he
only chooses among a charmed circle. The position of most men in
Parliament forbids their being invited to the Cabinet; the position of
a few men ensures their being invited. Between the compulsory list whom
he must take, and the impossible list whom he cannot take, a Prime
Minister's independent choice in the formation of a Cabinet is not very
large; it extends rather to the division of the Cabinet offices than to
the choice of Cabinet Ministers. Parliament and the nation have pretty
well settled who shall have the first places; but they have not
discriminated with the same accuracy which man shall have which place.
The highest patronage of a Prime Minister is, of course, a considerable
power, though it is exercised under close and imperative
restrictions--though it is far less than it seems to be when stated in
theory, or looked at from a distance.

The Cabinet, in a word, is a board of control chosen by the
legislature, out of persons whom it trusts and knows, to rule the
nation. The particular mode in which the English Ministers are
selected; the fiction that they are, in any political sense, the
Queen's servants; the rule which limits the choice of the Cabinet to
the members of the legislature--are accidents unessential to its
definition--historical incidents separable from its nature. Its
characteristic is that it should be chosen by the legislature out of
persons agreeable to and trusted by the legislature. Naturally these
are principally its own members--but they need not be exclusively so. A
Cabinet which included persons not members of the legislative assembly
might still perform all useful duties. Indeed the peers, who constitute
a large element in modern Cabinets, are members, now-a-days, only of a
subordinate assembly. The House of Lords still exercises several useful
functions; but the ruling influence--the deciding faculty--has passed
to what, using the language of old times, we still call the lower
house--to an assembly which, though inferior as a dignified
institution, is superior as an efficient institution. A principal
advantage of the House of Lords in the present age indeed consists in
its thus acting as a reservoir of Cabinet Ministers. Unless the
composition of the House of Commons were improved, or unless the rules
requiring Cabinet Ministers to be members of the legislature were
relaxed, it would undoubtedly be difficult to find, without the lords,
a sufficient supply of chief Ministers. But the detail of the
composition of a Cabinet, and the precise method of its choice, are not
to the purpose now. The first and cardinal consideration is the
definition of a Cabinet. We must not bewilder ourselves with the
inseparable accidents until we know the necessary essence. A Cabinet is
a combining committee--a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens,
the legislative part of the State to the executive part of the State.
In its origin it belongs to the one, in its functions it belongs to the
other.

The most curious point about the Cabinet is that so very little is
known about it. The meetings are not only secret in theory, but secret
in reality. By the present practice, no official minute in all ordinary
cases is kept of them. Even a private note is discouraged and disliked.
The House of Commons, even in its most inquisitive and turbulent
moments, would scarcely permit a note of a Cabinet meeting to be read.
No Minister who respected the fundamental usages of political practice
would attempt to read such a note. The committee which unites the
law-making power to the law-executing power--which, by virtue of that
combination, is, while it lasts and holds together, the most powerful
body in the State--is a committee wholly secret. No description of it,
at once graphic and authentic, has ever been given. It is said to be
sometimes like a rather disorderly board of directors, where many speak
and few listen--though no one knows.[1] But a Cabinet, though it is a
committee of the legislative assembly, is a committee with a power
which no assembly would--unless for historical accidents, and after
happy experience--have been persuaded to entrust to any committee. It
is a committee which can dissolve the assembly which appointed it; it
is a committee with a suspensive veto--a committee with a power of
appeal. Though appointed by one Parliament, it can appeal if it chooses
to the next. Theoretically, indeed, the power to dissolve Parliament is
entrusted to the sovereign only; and there are vestiges of doubt
whether in ALL cases a sovereign is bound to dissolve Parliament when
the Cabinet asks him to do so. But neglecting such small and dubious
exceptions, the Cabinet which was chosen by one House of Commons has an
appeal to the next House of Commons. The chief committee of the
legislature has the power of dissolving the predominant part of that
legislature--that which at a crisis is the supreme legislature. The
English system, therefore, is not an absorption of the executive power
by the legislative power; it is a fusion of the two. Either the Cabinet
legislates and acts, or else it can dissolve. It is a creature, but it
has the power of destroying its creators. It is an executive which can
annihilate the legislature, as well as an executive which is the
nominee of the legislature. It was made, but it can unmake; it was
derivative in its origin, but it is destructive in its action. This
fusion of the legislative and executive functions may, to those who
have not much considered it, seem but a dry and small matter to be the
latent essence and effectual secret of the English Constitution; but we
can only judge of its real importance by looking at a few of its
principal effects, and contrasting it very shortly with its great
competitor, which seems likely, unless care be taken, to outstrip it in
the progress of the world. That competitor is the Presidential system.
The characteristic of it is that the President is elected from the
people by one process, and the House of Representatives by another. The
independence of the legislative and executive powers is the specific
quality of Presidential government, just as their fusion and
combination is the precise principle of Cabinet government.


[1] It is said that at the end of the Cabinet which agreed to propose a
fixed duty on corn, Lord Melbourne put his back to the door and said,
"Now is it to lower the price of corn or isn't it? It is not much
matter which we say, but mind, we must all say THE SAME." This is the
most graphic story of a Cabinet I ever heard, but I cannot vouch for
its truth. Lord Melbourne's is a character about which men make stories.


First, compare the two in quiet times. The essence of a civilised age
is, that administration requires the continued aid of legislation. One
principal and necessary kind of legislation is taxation. The expense of
civilised government is continually varying. It must vary if the
Government does its duty. The miscellaneous estimates of the English
Government contain an inevitable medley of changing items. Education,
prison discipline, art, science, civil contingencies of a hundred
kinds, require more money one year and less another. The expense of
defence--the naval and military estimates--vary still more as the
danger of attack seems more or less imminent, as the means of retarding
such danger become more or less costly. If the persons who have to do
the work are not the same as those who have to make the laws, there
will be a controversy between the two sets of persons. The tax-imposers
are sure to quarrel with the tax-requirers. The executive is crippled
by not getting the laws it needs, and the legislature is spoiled by
having to act without responsibility: the executive becomes unfit for
its name, since it cannot execute what it decides on; the legislature
is demoralised by liberty, by taking decisions of which others (and not
itself) will suffer the effects.

In America so much has this difficulty been felt that a semi-connection
has grown up between the legislature and the executive. When the
Secretary of the Treasury of the Federal Government wants a tax he
consults upon it with the chairman of the Financial Committee of
Congress. He cannot go down to Congress himself and propose what he
wants; he can only write a letter and send it. But he tries to get a
chairman of the Finance Committee who likes his tax;--through that
chairman he tries to persuade the committee to recommend such tax; by
that committee he tries to induce the house to adopt that tax. But such
a chain of communications is liable to continual interruptions; it may
suffice for a single tax on a fortunate occasion, but will scarcely
pass a complicated budget--we do not say in a war or a rebellion--we
are now comparing the Cabinet system and the Presidential system in
quiet times--but in times of financial difficulty. Two clever men never
exactly agreed about a budget. We have by present practice an Indian
Chancellor of the Exchequer talking English finance at Calcutta, and an
English one talking Indian finance in England. But the figures are
never the same, and the views of policy are rarely the same. One most
angry controversy has amused the world, and probably others scarcely
less interesting are hidden in the copious stores of our Anglo-Indian
correspondence.

But relations something like these must subsist between the head of a
finance committee in the legislature, and a finance Minister in the
executive.[2] They are sure to quarrel, and the result is sure to
satisfy neither. And when the taxes do not yield as they were expected
to yield, who is responsible? Very likely the Secretary of the Treasury
could not persuade the chairman--very likely the chairman could not
persuade his committee--very likely the committee could not persuade
the assembly. Whom, then, can you punish--whom can you abolish--when
your taxes run short? There is nobody save the legislature, a vast
miscellaneous body difficult to punish, and the very persons to inflict
the punishment. Nor is the financial part of administration the only
one which requires in a civilised age the constant support and
accompaniment of facilitating legislation. All administration does so.
In England, on a vital occasion, the Cabinet can compel legislation by
the threat of resignation, and the threat of dissolution; but neither
of these can be used in a Presidential State. There the legislature
cannot be dissolved by the executive Government; and it does not heed a
resignation, for it has not to find the successor. Accordingly, when a
difference of opinion arises, the legislature is forced to fight the
executive, and the executive is forced to fight the legislative; and so
very likely they contend to the conclusion of their respective
terms.[3] There is, indeed, one condition of things in which this
description, though still approximately true, is, nevertheless, not
exactly true; and that is, when there is nothing to fight about. Before
the rebellion in America, owing to the vast distance of other States,
and the favourable economic condition of the country, there were very
few considerable objects of contention; but if that government had been
tried by English legislation of the last thirty years, the discordant
action of the two powers, whose constant cooperation is essential to
the best government, would have shown itself much more distinctly. Nor
is this the worst. Cabinet government educates the nation; the
Presidential does not educate it, and may corrupt it. It has been said
that England invented the phrase, "Her Majesty's Opposition"; that it
was the first Government which made a criticism of administration as
much a part of the polity as administration itself. This critical
opposition is the consequence of Cabinet government. The great scene of
debate, the great engine of popular instruction and political
controversy, is the legislative assembly. A speech there by an eminent
statesman, a party movement by a great political combination, are the
best means yet known for arousing, enlivening, and teaching a people.
The Cabinet system ensures such debates, for it makes them the means by
which statesmen advertise themselves for future and confirm themselves
in present Governments. It brings forward men eager to speak, and gives
them occasions to speak. The deciding catastrophes of Cabinet
governments are critical divisions preceded by fine discussions.
Everything which is worth saying, everything which ought to be said,
most certainly WILL be said. Conscientious men think they ought to
persuade others; selfish men think they would like to obtrude
themselves. The nation is forced to hear two sides--all the sides,
perhaps, of that which most concerns it. And it likes to hear--it is
eager to know. Human nature despises long arguments which come to
nothing--heavy speeches which precede no motion--abstract disquisitions
which leave visible things where they were. But all men heed great
results, and a change of Government is a great result. It has a hundred
ramifications; it runs through society; it gives hope to many, and it
takes away hope from many. It is one of those marked events which, by
its magnitude and its melodrama, impress men even too much. And debates
which have this catastrophe at the end of them--or may so have it--are
sure to be listened to, and sure to sink deep into the national mind.
Travellers even in the Northern States of America, the greatest and
best of Presidential countries, have noticed that the nation was "not
specially addicted to politics"; that they have not a public opinion
finished and chastened as that of the English has been finished and
chastened. A great many hasty writers have charged this defect on the
"Yankee race," on the Anglo-American character; but English people, if
they had no motive to attend to politics, certainly would not attend to
politics. At present there is BUSINESS in their attention. They assist
at the determining crisis; they arrest or help it. Whether the
Government will go out or remain is determined by the debate, and by
the division in Parliament. And the opinion out of doors, the secret
pervading disposition of society, has a great influence on that
division. The nation feels that its judgment is important, and it
strives to judge. It succeeds in deciding because the debates and the
discussions give it the facts and the arguments. But under a
Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment,
no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone,
and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns. It is not
incited to form an opinion like a nation under a Cabinet government;
nor is it instructed like such a nation. There are doubtless debates in
the legislature, but they are prologues without a play. There is
nothing of a catastrophe about them; you can not turn out the
Government. The prize of power is not in the gift of the legislature,
and no one cares for the legislature. The executive, the great centre
of power and place, sticks irremovable; you cannot change it in any
event. The teaching apparatus which has educated our public mind, which
prepares our resolutions, which shapes our opinions, does not exist. No
Presidential country needs to form daily delicate opinions, or is
helped in forming them. It might be thought that the discussions in the
press would supply the deficiencies in the Constitution; that by a
reading people especially, the conduct of their Government would be as
carefully watched, that their opinions about it would be as consistent,
as accurate, as well considered, under a Presidential as under a
Cabinet polity. But the same difficulty oppresses the press which
oppresses the legislature. It can DO NOTHING. It cannot change the
administration; the executive was elected for such and such years, and
for such and such years it must last. People wonder that so literary a
people as the Americans--a people who read more than any people who
ever lived, who read so many newspapers--should have such bad
newspapers. The papers are not so good as the English, because they
have not the same motive to be good as the English papers. At a
political "crisis," as we say--that is, when the fate of an
administration is unfixed, when it depends on a few votes yet
unsettled, upon a wavering and veering opinion--effective articles in
great journals become of essential moment. The Times has made many
ministries. When, as of late, there has been a long continuance of
divided Parliaments, of Governments which were without "brute voting
power," and which depended on intellectual strength, the support of the
most influential organ of English opinion has been of critical moment.
If a Washington newspaper could have turned out Mr. Lincoln, there
would have been good writing and fine argument in the Washington
newspapers. But the Washington newspapers can no more remove a
President during his term of place than the Times can remove a lord
mayor during his year of office. Nobody cares for a debate in Congress
which "comes to nothing," and no one reads long articles which have no
influence on events. The Americans glance at the heads of news, and
through the paper. They do not enter upon a discussion. They do not
think of entering upon a discussion which would be useless.


[2] It is worth observing that even during the short existence of the
Confederate Government these evils distinctly showed themselves. Almost
the last incident at the Richmond Congress was an angry financial
correspondence with Jefferson Davis.

[3] I leave this passage to stand as it was written, just after the
assassination of Mr. Lincoln, and when every one said Mr. Johnson would
be very hostile to the South.


After saying that the division of the legislature and the executive in
Presidential governments weakens the legislative power, it may seem a
contradiction to say that it also weakens the executive power. But it
is not a contradiction. The division weakens the whole aggregate force
of Government--the entire imperial power; and therefore it weakens both
its halves. The executive is weakened in a very plain way. In England a
strong Cabinet can obtain the concurrence of the legislature in all
acts which facilitate its administration; it is itself, so to say, the
legislature. But a President may be hampered by the Parliament, and is
likely to be hampered. The natural tendency of the members of every
legislature is to make themselves conspicuous. They wish to gratify an
ambition laudable or blamable; they wish to promote the measures they
think best for the public welfare; they wish to make their WILL felt in
great affairs. All these mixed motives urge them to oppose the
executive. They are embodying the purposes of others if they aid; they
are advancing their own opinions if they defeat: they are first if they
vanquish; they are auxiliaries if they support. The weakness of the
American executive used to be the great theme of all critics before the
Confederate rebellion. Congress and committees of Congress of course
impeded the executive when there was no coercive public sentiment to
check and rule them.

But the Presidential system not only gives the executive power an
antagonist in the legislative power, and so makes it weaker; it also
enfeebles it by impairing its intrinsic quality. A Cabinet is elected
by a legislature; and when that legislature is composed of fit persons,
that mode of electing the executive is the very best. It is a case of
secondary election, under the only conditions in which secondary
election is preferable to primary. Generally speaking, in an
electioneering country (I mean in a country full of political life, and
used to the manipulation of popular institutions), the election of
candidates to elect candidates is a farce. The Electoral College of
America is so. It was intended that the deputies when assembled should
exercise a real discretion, and by independent choice select the
President. But the primary electors take too much interest. They only
elect a deputy to vote for Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Breckenridge, and the
deputy only takes a ticket, and drops that ticket in an urn. He never
chooses or thinks of choosing. He is but a messenger--a transmitter;
the real decision is in those who choose him--who chose him because
they knew what he would do. It is true that the British House of
Commons is subject to the same influences. Members are mostly, perhaps,
elected because they will vote for a particular Ministry, rather than
for purely legislative reasons. But--and here is the capital
distinction--the functions of the House of Commons are important and
CONTINUOUS. It does not, like the Electoral College in the United
States, separate when it has elected its ruler; it watches, legislates,
seats and unseats ministries, from day to day. Accordingly it is a REAL
electoral body. The Parliament of 1857, which, more than any other
Parliament of late years, was a Parliament elected to support a
particular premier--which was chosen, as Americans might say, upon the
"Palmerston ticket"--before it had been in existence two years,
dethroned Lord Palmerston. Though selected in the interest of a
particular Ministry, it in fact destroyed that Ministry. A good
Parliament, too, is a capital choosing body. If it is fit to make laws
for a country, its majority ought to represent the general average
intelligence of that country; its various members ought to represent
the various special interests, special opinions, special prejudices, to
be found in that community. There ought to be an advocate for every
particular sect, and a vast neutral body of no sect--homogeneous and
judicial, like the nation itself. Such a body, when possible, is the
best selector of executives that can be imagined. It is full of
political activity; it is close to political life; it feels the
responsibility of affairs which are brought as it were to its
threshold; it has as much intelligence as the society in question
chances to contain. It is, what Washington and Hamilton strove to
create, an electoral college of the picked men of the nation. The best
mode of appreciating its advantages is to look at the alternative. The
competing constituency is the nation itself, and this is, according to
theory and experience, in all but the rarest cases, a bad constituency.
Mr. Lincoln, at his second election, being elected when all the Federal
States had set their united hearts on one single object, was
voluntarily reelected by an actually choosing nation. He embodied the
object in which every one was absorbed. But this is almost the only
Presidential election of which so much can be said. In almost all cases
the President is chosen by a machinery of caucuses and combinations too
complicated to be perfectly known, and too familiar to require
description. He is not the choice of the nation, he is the choice of
the wire-pullers. A very large constituency in quiet times is the
necessary, almost the legitimate, subject of electioneering management:
a man cannot know that he does not throw his vote away except he votes
as part of some great organisation; and if he votes as a part, he
abdicates his electoral function in favour of the managers of that
association. The nation, even if it chose for itself, would, in some
degree, be an unskilled body; but when it does not choose for itself,
but only as latent agitators wish, it is like a large, lazy man, with a
small vicious mind,--it moves slowly and heavily, but it moves at the
bidding of a bad intention; it "means LITTLE, but it means that little
ILL."

And, as the nation is less able to choose than a Parliament, so it has
worse people to choose out of. The American legislators of the last
century have been much blamed for not permitting the Ministers of the
President to be members of the assembly; but, with reference to the
specific end which they had in view, they saw clearly and decided
wisely. They wished to keep "the legislative branch absolutely distinct
from the executive branch"; they believed such a separation to be
essential to a good constitution; they believed such a separation to
exist in the English, which the wisest of them thought the best
Constitution. And, to the effectual maintenance of such a separation,
the exclusion of the President's Ministers from the legislature is
essential. If they are not excluded they become the executive, they
eclipse the President himself. A legislative chamber is greedy and
covetous; it acquires as much, it concedes as little as possible. The
passions of its members are its rulers; the law-making faculty, the
most comprehensive of the imperial faculties, is its instrument; it
will take the administration if it can take it. Tried by their own
aims, the founders of the United States were wise in excluding the
Ministers from Congress.

But though this exclusion is essential to the Presidential system of
government, it is not for that reason a small evil. It causes the
degradation of public life. Unless a member of the legislature be sure
of something more than speech, unless he is incited by the hope of
action, and chastened by the chance of responsibility, a first-rate man
will not care to take the place, and will not do much if he does take
it. To belong to a debating society adhering to an executive (and this
is no inapt description of a congress under a Presidential
Constitution) is not an object to stir a noble ambition, and is a
position to encourage idleness. The members of a Parliament excluded
from office can never be comparable, much less equal, to those of a
Parliament not excluded from office. The Presidential Government, by
its nature, divides political life into two halves, an executive half
and a legislative half; and, by so dividing it, makes neither half
worth a man's having--worth his making it a continuous career--worthy
to absorb, as Cabinet government absorbs, his whole soul. The statesmen
from whom a nation chooses under a Presidential system are much
inferior to those from whom it chooses under a Cabinet system, while
the selecting apparatus is also far less discerning.

All these differences are more important at critical periods, because
government itself is more important. A formed public opinion, a
respectable, able, and disciplined legislature, a well-chosen
executive, a Parliament and an administration not thwarting each other,
but co-operating with each other, are of greater consequence when great
affairs are in progress than when small affairs are in progress-when
there is much to do than when there is little to do. But in addition to
this, a Parliamentary or Cabinet Constitution possesses an additional
and special advantage in very dangerous times. It has what we may call
a reserve of power fit for and needed by extreme exigencies.

The principle of popular government is that the supreme power, the
determining efficacy in matters political, resides in the people--not
necessarily or commonly in the whole people, in the numerical majority,
but in a CHOSEN people, a picked and selected people. It is so in
England; it is so in all free countries. Under a Cabinet Constitution
at a sudden emergency this people can choose a ruler for the occasion.
It is quite possible and even likely that he would not be ruler before
the occasion. The great qualities, the imperious will, the rapid
energy, the eager nature fit for a great crisis are not required--are
impediments--in common times; A Lord Liverpool is better in everyday
politics than a Chatham--a Louis Philippe far better than a Napoleon.
By the structure of the world we often want, at the sudden occurrence
of a grave tempest, to change the helmsman--to replace the pilot of the
calm by the pilot of the storm. In England we have had so few
catastrophes since our Constitution attained maturity, that we hardly
appreciate this latent excellence. We have not needed a Cavour to rule
a revolution--a representative man above all men fit for a great
occasion, and by a natural legal mode brought in to rule. But even in
England, at what was the nearest to a great sudden crisis which we have
had of late years--at the Crimean difficulty--we used this inherent
power. We abolished the Aberdeen Cabinet, the ablest we have had,
perhaps, since the Reform Act--a Cabinet not only adapted, but
eminently adapted, for every sort of difficulty save the one it had to
meet--which abounded in pacific discretion, and was wanting only in the
"daemonic element"; we chose a statesman, who had the sort of merit
then wanted, who, when he feels the steady power of England behind him,
will advance without reluctance, and will strike without restraint. As
was said at the time, "We turned out the Quaker, and put in the
pugilist".

But under a Presidential government you can do nothing of the kind. The
American Government calls itself a Government of the supreme people;
but at a quick crisis, the time when a sovereign power is most needed,
you cannot FIND the supreme people. You have got a Congress elected for
one fixed period, going out perhaps by fixed instalments, which cannot
be accelerated or retarded--you have a President chosen for a fixed
period, and immovable during that period: all the arrangements are for
STATED times. There is no ELASTIC element, everything is rigid,
specified, dated. Come what may, you can quicken nothing, and can
retard nothing. You have bespoken your Government in advance, and
whether it suits you or not, whether it works well or works ill,
whether it is what you want or not, by law you must keep it. In a
country of complex foreign relations it would mostly happen that the
first and most critical year of every war would be managed by a peace
Premier, and the first and most critical years of peace by a war
Premier. In each case the period of transition would be irrevocably
governed by a man selected not for what he was to introduce, but what
he was to change--for the policy he was to abandon, not for the policy
he was to administer.

The whole history of the American Civil War--a history which has thrown
an intense light on the working of a Presidential government at the
time when government is most important--is but a vast continuous
commentary on these reflections. It would, indeed, be absurd to press
against Presidential government AS SUCH the singular defect by which
Vice-President Johnson has become President--by which a man elected to
a sinecure is fixed in what is for the moment the most important
administrative part in the political world. This defect, though most
characteristic of the expectations[4] of the framers of the
Constitution and of its working, is but an accident of this particular
case of Presidential government, and no necessary ingredient in that
government itself. But the first election of Mr. Lincoln is liable to
no such objection. It was a characteristic instance of the natural
working of such a government upon a great occasion. And what was that
working? It may be summed up--it was government by an UNKNOWN QUANTITY.
Hardly any one in America had any living idea what Mr. Lincoln was
like, or any definite notion what he would do. The leading statesmen
under the system of Cabinet government are not only household words,
but household IDEAS. A conception, not, perhaps, in all respects a true
but a most vivid conception of what Mr. Gladstone is like, or what Lord
Palmerston is like, runs through society. We have simply no notion what
it would be to be left with the visible sovereignty in the hands of an
unknown man. The notion of employing a man of unknown smallness at a
crisis of unknown greatness is to our minds simply ludicrous. Mr.
Lincoln, it is true, happened to be a man, if not of eminent ability,
yet of eminent justness. There was an inner depth of Puritan nature
which came out under suffering, and was very attractive. But success in
a lottery is no argument for lotteries. What were the chances against a
person of Lincoln's antecedents, elected as he was, proving to be what
he was? Such an incident is, however, natural to a Presidential
government. The President is elected by processes which forbid the
election of known men, except at peculiar conjunctures, and in moments
when public opinion is excited and despotic; and consequently if a
crisis comes upon us soon after he is elected, inevitably we have
government by an unknown quantity--the superintendence of that crisis
by what our great satirist would have called "Statesman X". Even in
quiet times, government by a President, is, for the several various
reasons which have been stated, inferior to government by a Cabinet;
but the difficulty of quiet times is nothing as compared with the
difficulty of unquiet times. The comparative deficiencies of the
regular, common operation of a Presidential government are far less
than the comparative deficiencies in time of sudden trouble--the want
of elasticity, the impossibility of a dictatorship, the total absence
of a REVOLUTIONARY RESERVE. This contrast explains why the
characteristic quality of Cabinet Governments--the fusion of the
executive power with the legislative power--is of such cardinal
importance. I shall proceed to show under what form and with what
adjuncts it exists in England.


[4] The framers of the Constitution expected that the vice-president
would be elected by the Electoral College as the second wisest man in
the country. The vice-presidentship being a sinecure, a second-rate man
agreeable to the wire-pullers is always smuggled in. The chance of
succession to the presidentship is too distant to be thought of.




NO. III.

THE MONARCHY.


I.

The use of the Queen, in a dignified capacity, is incalculable. Without
her in England, the present English Government would fail and pass
away. Most people when they read that the Queen walked on the slopes at
Windsor--that the Prince of Wales went to the Derby--have imagined that
too much thought and prominence were given to little things. But they
have been in error; and it is nice to trace how the actions of a
retired widow and an unemployed youth become of such importance.

The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an
intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they
hardly anywhere in the world understand any other. It is often said
that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say
they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations. The nature of
a constitution, the action of an assembly, the play of parties, the
unseen formation of a guiding opinion, are complex facts, difficult to
know and easy to mistake. But the action of a single will, the fiat of
a single mind, are easy ideas: anybody can make them out, and no one
can ever forget them. When you put before the mass of mankind the
question, "Will you be governed by a king, or will you be governed by a
constitution?" the inquiry comes out thus--"Will you be governed in a
way you understand, or will you be governed in a way you do not
understand?" The issue was put to the French people; they were asked,
"Will you be governed by Louis Napoleon, or will you be governed by an
assembly?" The French people said, "We will be governed by the one man
we can imagine, and not by the many people we cannot imagine".

The best mode of comprehending the nature of the two Governments, is to
look at a country in which the two have within a comparatively short
space of years succeeded each other.

"The political condition," says Mr. Grote, "which Grecian legend
everywhere presents to us, is in its principal features strikingly
different from that which had become universally prevalent among the
Greeks in the time of the Peloponnesian War. Historical oligarchy, as
well as democracy, agreed in requiring a certain established system of
government, comprising the three elements of specialised functions,
temporary functionaries, and ultimate responsibility (under some forms
or other) to the mass of qualified citizens--either a Senate or an
Ecclesia, or both. There were, of course, many and capital distinctions
between one Government and another, in respect to the qualification of
the citizen, the attributes and efficiency of the general assembly, the
admissibility to power, etc.; and men might often be dissatisfied with
the way in which these questions were determined in their own city. But
in the mind of every man, some determining rule or system--something
like what in modern times is called a CONSTITUTION--was indispensable
to any Government entitled to be called legitimate, or capable of
creating in the mind of a Greek a feeling of moral obligation to obey
it. The functionaries who exercise authority under it might be more or
less competent or popular; but his personal feelings towards them were
commonly lost in his attachment or aversion to the general system. If
any energetic man could by audacity or craft break down the
Constitution, and render himself permanent ruler according to his own
will and pleasure, even though he might govern well, he could never
inspire the people with any sentiment of duty towards him: his sceptre
was illegitimate from the beginning, and even the taking of his life,
far from being interdicted by that moral feeling which condemned the
shedding of blood in other cases, was considered meritorious: he could
not even be mentioned in the language except by a name (_tyrannos_,
despot) which branded him as an object of mingled fear and dislike.

"If we carry our eyes back from historical to legendary Greece, we find
a picture the reverse of what has been here sketched. We discern a
government in which there is little or no scheme or system, still less
any idea of responsibility to the governed, but in which the mainspring
of obedience on the part of the people consists in their personal
feeling and reverence towards the chief. We remark, first and foremost,
the King; next, a limited number of subordinate kings or chiefs;
afterwards, the mass of armed freemen, husbandmen, artisans,
freebooters, &c.; lowest of all, the free labourers for hire and the
bought slaves. The King is not distinguished by any broad, or
impassable boundary from the other chiefs, to each of whom the title
Basileus is applicable as well as to himself: his supremacy has been
inherited from his ancestors, and passes by inheritance, as a general
rule, to his eldest son, having been conferred upon the family as a
privilege by the favour of Zeus. In war, he is the leader, foremost in
personal prowess, and directing all military movements; in peace, he is
the general protector of the injured and oppressed; he offers up
moreover those public prayers and sacrifices which are intended to
obtain for the whole people the favour of the gods. An ample domain is
assigned to him as an appurtenance of his lofty position, and the
produce of his fields and his cattle is consecrated in part to an
abundant, though rude hospitality. Moreover he receives frequent
presents, to avert his enmity, to conciliate his favour, or to buy off
his exactions; and when plunder is taken from the enemy, a large
previous share, comprising probably the most alluring female captive,
is reserved for him apart from the general distribution.

"Such is the position of the King in the heroic times of Greece--the
only person (if we except the herald, and priests, each both special
and subordinate) who is then presented to us as clothed with any
individual authority--the person by whom all the executive functions,
then few in number, which the society requires, are either performed or
directed. His personal ascendancy--derived from Divine countenance
bestowed both upon himself individually and upon his race, and probably
from accredited Divine descent--is the salient feature in the picture:
the people hearken to his voice, embrace his propositions, and obey his
orders: not merely resistance, but even criticism upon his acts, is
generally exhibited in an odious point of view, and is indeed never
heard of except from some one or more of the subordinate princes."

The characteristic of the English Monarchy is that it retains the
feelings by which the heroic kings governed their rude age, and has
added the feelings by which the Constitutions of later Greece ruled in
more refined ages. We are a more mixed people than the Athenians, or
probably than any political Greeks. We have progressed more unequally.
The slaves in ancient times were a separate order; not ruled by the
same laws, or thoughts, as other men. It was not necessary to think of
them in making a constitution: it was not necessary to improve them in
order to make a constitution possible. The Greek legislator had not to
combine in his polity men like the labourers of Somersetshire, and men
like Mr. Grote. He had not to deal with a community in which primitive
barbarism lay as a recognised basis to acquired civilisation. WE HAVE.
We have no slaves to keep down by special terrors and independent
legislation. But we have whole classes unable to comprehend the idea of
a constitution--unable to feel the least attachment to impersonal laws.
Most do indeed vaguely know that there are some other institutions
besides the Queen, and some rules by which she governs. But a vast
number like their minds to dwell more upon her than upon anything else,
and therefore she is inestimable. A republic has only difficult ideas
in government; a Constitutional Monarchy has an easy idea too; it has a
comprehensible element for the vacant many, as well as complex laws and
notions for the inquiring few.

A FAMILY on the throne is an interesting idea also. It brings down the
pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life. No feeling could seem
more childish than the enthusiasm of the English at the marriage of the
Prince of Wales. They treated as a great political event, what, looked
at as a matter of pure business, was very small indeed. But no feeling
could be more like common human nature as it is, and as it is likely to
be. The women--one half the human race at least--care fifty times more
for a marriage than a ministry. All but a few cynics like to see a
pretty novel touching for a moment the dry scenes of the grave world. A
princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as
such, it rivets mankind. We smile at the Court Circular; but remember
how many people read the Court Circular! Its use is not in what it
says, but in those to whom it speaks. They say that the Americans were
more pleased at the Queen's letter to Mrs. Lincoln, than at any act of
the English Government. It was a spontaneous act of intelligible
feeling in the midst of confused and tiresome business. Just so a royal
family sweetens politics by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty
events. It introduces irrelevant facts into the business of government,
but they are facts which speak to "men's bosoms" and employ their
thoughts.

To state the matter shortly, royalty is a government in which the
attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting
actions. A Republic is a government in which that attention is divided
between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so
long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty
will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics
weak because they appeal to the understanding.

Secondly. The English Monarchy strengthens our Government with the
strength of religion. It is not easy to say why it should be so. Every
instructed theologian would say that it was the duty of a person born
under a Republic as much to obey that Republic as it is the duty of one
born under a Monarchy to obey the monarch. But the mass of the English
people do not think so; they agree with the oath of allegiance; they
say it is their duty to obey the "Queen," and they have but hazy
notions as to obeying laws without a queen. In former times, when our
Constitution was incomplete, this notion of local holiness in one part
was mischievous. All parts were struggling, and it was necessary each
should have its full growth. But superstition said one should grow
where it would, and no other part should grow without its leave. The
whole cavalier party said it was their duty to obey the king, whatever
the king did. There was to be "passive obedience" to him, and there was
no religious obedience due to any one else. He was the "Lord's
anointed," and no one else had been anointed at all. The Parliament,
the laws, the press were human institutions; but the Monarchy was a
Divine institution. An undue advantage was given to a part of the
Constitution, and therefore the progress of the whole was stayed.

After the Revolution this mischievous sentiment was much weaker. The
change of the line of sovereigns was at first conclusive, If there was
a mystic right in any one, that right was plainly in James II.; if it
was an English duty to obey any one whatever he did, he was the person
to be so obeyed; if there was an inherent inherited claim in any king,
it was in the Stuart king to whom the crown had come by descent, and
not in the Revolution king to whom it had come by vote of Parliament.
All through the reign of William III. there was (in common speech) one
king whom man had made, and another king whom God had made. The king
who ruled had no consecrated loyalty to build upon; although he ruled
in fact, according to sacred theory there was a king in France who
ought to rule. But it was very hard for the English people, with their
plain sense and slow imagination, to keep up a strong sentiment of
veneration for a foreign adventurer. He lived under the protection of a
French king; what he did was commonly stupid, and what he left undone
was very often wise. As soon as Queen Anne began to reign there was a
change of feeling; the old sacred sentiment began to cohere about her.
There were indeed difficulties which would have baffled most people;
but an Englishman whose heart is in a matter is not easily baffled.
Queen Anne had a brother living and a father living, and by every rule
of descent, their right was better than hers. But many people evaded
both claims. They said James II. had "run away," and so abdicated,
though he only ran away because he was in duresse and was frightened,
and though he claimed the allegiance of his subjects day by day. The
Pretender, it was said, was not legitimate, though the birth was proved
by evidence which any Court of Justice would have accepted. The English
people were "out of" a sacred monarch, and so they tried very hard to
make a new one. Events, however, were too strong for them. They were
ready and eager to take Queen Anne as the stock of a new dynasty; they
were ready to ignore the claims of her father and the claims of her
brother, but they could not ignore the fact that at the critical period
she had no children. She had once had thirteen, but they all died in
her lifetime, and it was necessary either to revert to the Stuarts or
to make a new king by Act of Parliament.

According to the Act of Settlement passed by the Whigs, the crown was
settled on the descendants of the "Princess Sophia" of Hanover, a
younger daughter of a daughter of James I. There were before her James
II., his son, the descendants of a daughter of Charles I., and elder
children of her own mother. But the Whigs passed these over because
they were Catholics, and selected the Princess Sophia, who, if she was
anything, was a Protestant. Certainly this selection was statesmanlike,
but it could not be very popular. It was quite impossible to say that
it was the duty of the English people to obey the House of Hanover upon
any principles which do not concede the right of the people to choose
their rulers, and which do not degrade monarchy from its solitary
pinnacle of majestic reverence, and make it one only among many
expedient institutions. If a king is a useful public functionary who
may be changed, and in whose place you may make another, you cannot
regard him with mystic awe and wonder; and if you are bound to worship
him, of course you cannot change him. Accordingly, during the whole
reigns of George I. and George II. the sentiment of religious loyalty
altogether ceased to support the Crown. The prerogative of the king had
no strong party to support it; the Tories, who naturally would support
it, disliked the actual king; and the Whigs, according to their creed,
disliked the king's office. Until the accession of George III. the most
vigorous opponents of the Crown were the country gentlemen, its natural
friends, and the representatives of quiet rural districts, where
loyalty is mostly to be found, if anywhere. But after the accession of
George III. the common feeling came back to the same point as in Queen
Anne's time. The English were ready to take the new young prince as the
beginning of a sacred line of sovereigns, just as they had been willing
to take an old lady, who was the second cousin of his
great-great-grandmother. So it is now. If you ask the immense majority
of the Queen's subjects by what right she rules, they would never tell
you that she rules by Parliamentary right, by virtue of 6 Anne, c. 7.
They will say she rules by "God's grace"; they believe that they have a
mystic obligation to obey her. When her family came to the Crown it was
a sort of treason to maintain the inalienable right of lineal
sovereignty, for it was equivalent to saying that the claim of another
family was better than hers: but now, in the strange course of human
events, that very sentiment has become her surest and best support.

But it would be a great mistake to believe that at the accession of
George III. the instinctive sentiment of hereditary loyalty at once
became as useful as now. It began to be powerful, but it hardly began
to be useful. There was so much harm done by it as well as so much
good, that it is quite capable of being argued whether on the whole it
was beneficial or hurtful. Throughout the greater part of his life
George III. was a kind of "consecrated obstruction". Whatever he did
had a sanctity different from what any one else did, and it perversely
happened that he was commonly wrong. He had as good intentions as any
one need have, and he attended to the business of his country, as a
clerk with his bread to get attends to the business of his office. But
his mind was small, his education limited, and he lived in a changing
time. Accordingly, he was always resisting what ought to be, and
prolonging what ought not to be. He was the sinister but sacred
assailant of half his ministries; and when the French Revolution
excited the horror of the world, and proved democracy to be "impious,"
the piety of England concentrated upon him, and gave him tenfold
strength. The Monarchy by its religious sanction now confirms all our
political order; in George III.'s time it confirmed little except
itself. It gives now a vast strength to the entire Constitution, by
enlisting on its behalf the credulous obedience of enormous masses;
then it lived aloof, absorbed all the holiness into itself, and turned
over all the rest of the polity to the coarse justification of bare
expediency.

A principal reason why the Monarchy so well consecrates our whole state
is to be sought in the peculiarity many Americans and many utilitarians
smile at. They laugh at this "extra," as the Yankee called it, at the
solitary transcendent element. They quote Napoleon's saying, "that he
did not wish to be fatted in idleness," when he refused to be grand
elector in Sieyes' Constitution, which was an office copied, and M.
Thiers says, well copied, from constitutional monarchy. But such
objections are wholly wrong. No doubt it was absurd enough in the Abbe
Sieyes to propose that a new institution, inheriting no reverence, and
made holy by no religion, should be created to fill the sort of post
occupied by a constitutional king in nations of monarchical history.
Such an institution, far from being so august as to spread reverence
around it, is too novel and artificial to get reverence for itself; if,
too, the absurdity could anyhow be augmented, it was so by offering an
office of inactive uselessness and pretended sanctity to Napoleon, the
most active man in France, with the greatest genius for business, only
not sacred, and exclusively fit for action. But the blunder of Sieyes
brings the excellence of real monarchy to the best light. When a
monarch can bless, it is best that he should not be touched. It should
be evident that he does no wrong. He should not be brought too closely
to real measurement. He should be aloof and solitary. As the functions
of English royalty are for the most part latent, it fulfils this
condition. It seems to order, but it never seems to struggle. It is
commonly hidden like a mystery, and sometimes paraded like a pageant,
but in neither case is it contentious. The nation is divided into
parties, but the crown is of no party. Its apparent separation from
business is that which removes it both from enmities and from
desecration, which preserves its mystery, which enables it to combine
the affection of conflicting parties--to be a visible symbol of unity
to those still so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol.

Thirdly. The Queen is the head of our society. If she did not exist the
Prime Minister would be the first person in the country. He and his
wife would have to receive foreign ministers, and occasionally foreign
princes, to give the first parties in the country; he and she would be
at the head of the pageant of life; they would represent England in the
eyes of foreign nations; they would represent the Government of England
in the eyes of the English.

It is very easy to imagine a world in which this change would not be a
great evil. In a country where people did not care for the outward show
of life, where the genius of the people was untheatrical, and they
exclusively regarded the substance of things, this matter would be
trifling. Whether Lord and Lady Derby received the foreign ministers,
or Lord and Lady Palmerston, would be a matter of indifference; whether
they gave the nicest parties would be important only to the persons at
those parties. A nation of unimpressible philosophers would not care at
all how the externals of life were managed. Who is the showman is not
material unless you care about the show.

But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a
nation of pure philosophers. It would be a very serious matter to us to
change every four or five years the visible head of our world. We are
not now remarkable for the highest sort of ambition; but we are
remarkable for having a great deal of the lower sort of ambition and
envy. The House of Commons is thronged with people who get there merely
for "social purposes," as the phrase goes; that is, that they and their
families may go to parties else impossible. Members of Parliament are
envied by thousands merely for this frivolous glory, as a thinker calls
it. If the highest post in conspicuous life were thrown open to public
competition, this low sort of ambition and envy would be fearfully
increased. Politics would offer a prize too dazzling for mankind;
clever base people would strive for it, and stupid base people would
envy it. Even now a dangerous distinction is given by what is
exclusively called public life. The newspapers describe daily and
incessantly a certain conspicuous existence; they comment on its
characters, recount its details, investigate its motives, anticipate
its course. They give a precedent and a dignity to that world which
they do not give to any other. The literary world, the scientific
world, the philosophic world, not only are not comparable in dignity to
the political world, but in comparison are hardly worlds at all. The
newspaper makes no mention of them, and could not mention them. As are
the papers, so are the readers; they, by irresistible sequence and
association, believe that those people who constantly figure in the
papers are cleverer, abler, or at any rate, somehow higher, than other
people. "I wrote books," we heard of a man saying, "for twenty years,
and I was nobody; I got into Parliament, and before I had taken my seat
I had become somebody." English politicians are the men who fill the
thoughts of the English public: they are the actors on the scene, and
it is hard for the admiring spectators not to believe that the admired
actor is greater than themselves. In this present age and country it
would be very dangerous to give the slightest addition to a force
already perilously great. If the highest social rank was to be
scrambled for in the House of Commons, the number of social adventurers
there would be incalculably more numerous, and indefinitely more eager.

A very peculiar combination of causes has made this characteristic one
of the most prominent in English society. The middle ages left all
Europe with a social system headed by Courts. The Government was made
the head of all society, all intercourse, and all life; everything paid
allegiance to the sovereign, and everything ranged itself round the
sovereign--what was next to be greatest, and what was farthest least.
The idea that the head of the Government is the head of society is so
fixed in the ideas of mankind that only a few philosophers regard it as
historical and accidental, though when the matter is examined, that
conclusion is certain and even obvious.

In the first place, society as society does not naturally need a head
at all. Its constitution, if left to itself, is not monarchical, but
aristocratical. Society, in the sense we are now talking of, is the
union of people for amusement and conversation. The making of marriages
goes on in it, as it were, incidentally, but its common and main
concern is talking and pleasure. There is nothing in this which needs a
single supreme head; it is a pursuit in which a single person does not
of necessity dominate. By nature it creates an "upper ten thousand"; a
certain number of persons and families possessed of equal culture, and
equal faculties, and equal spirit, get to be on a level--and that level
a high level. By boldness, by cultivation, by "social science" they
raise themselves above others; they become the "first families," and
all the rest come to be below them. But they tend to be much about a
level among one another; no one is recognised by all or by many others
as superior to them all. This is society as it grew up in Greece or
Italy, as it grows up now in any American or colonial town. So far from
the notion of a "head of society" being a necessary notion, in many
ages it would scarcely have been an intelligible notion. You could not
have made Socrates understand it. He would have said, "If you tell me
that one of my fellows is chief magistrate, and that I am bound to obey
him, I understand you, and you speak well; or that another is a priest,
and that he ought to offer sacrifices to the gods which I or any one
not a priest ought not to offer, again I understand and agree with you.
But if you tell me that there is in some citizen a hidden charm by
which his words become better than my words, and his house better than
my house, I do not follow you, and should be pleased if you will
explain yourself."

And even if a head of society were a natural idea, it certainly would
not follow that the head of the civil Government should be that head.
Society as such has no more to do with civil polity than with
ecclesiastical. The organisation of men and women for the purpose of
amusement is not necessarily identical with their organisation for
political purposes, any more than with their organisation for religious
purposes; it has of itself no more to do with the State than it has
with the Church. The faculties which fit a man to be a great ruler are
not those of society; some great rulers have been unintelligible like
Cromwell, or brusque like Napoleon, or coarse and barbarous like Sir
Robert Walpole. The light nothings of the drawing-room and the grave
things of office are as different from one another as two human
occupations can be. There is no naturalness in uniting the two; the end
of it always is, that you put a man at the head of society who very
likely is remarkable for social defects, and is not eminent for social
merits.

The best possible commentary on these remarks is the history of English
history. It has not been sufficiently remarked that a change has taken
place in the structure of our society exactly analogous to the change
in our polity. A Republic has insinuated itself beneath the folds of a
Monarchy. Charles II. was really the head of society; Whitehall, in his
time, was the centre of the best talk, the best fashion, and the most
curious love affairs of the age. He did not contribute good morality to
society, but he set an example of infinite agreeableness. He
concentrated around him all the light part of the high world of London,
and London concentrated around it all the light part of the high world
of England. The Court was the focus where everything fascinating
gathered, and where everything exciting centred. Whitehall was an
unequalled club, with female society of a very clever and sharp sort
superadded. All this, as we know, is now altered. Buckingham Palace is
as unlike a club as any place is likely to be. The Court is a separate
part, which stands aloof from the rest of the London world, and which
has but slender relations with the more amusing part of it. The first
two Georges were men ignorant of English, and wholly unfit to guide and
lead English society. They both preferred one or two German ladies of
bad character to all else in London. George III. had no social vices,
but he had no social pleasures. He was a family man, and a man of
business, and sincerely preferred a leg of mutton and turnips after a
good day's work, to the best fashion and the most exciting talk. In
consequence, society in London, though still in form under the
domination of a Court, assumed in fact its natural and oligarchical
structure. It, too, has become an "upper ten thousand"; it is no more
monarchical in fact than the society of New York. Great ladies give the
tone to it with little reference to the particular Court world. The
peculiarly masculine world of the clubs and their neighbourhood has no
more to do in daily life with Buckingham Palace than with the
Tuileries. Formal ceremonies of presentation and attendance are
retained. The names of levee and drawing-room still sustain the memory
of the time when the king's bed-chamber and the queen's "withdrawing
room" were the centres of London life, but they no longer make a part
of social enjoyment: they are a sort of ritual in which nowadays almost
every decent person can if he likes take part. Even Court balls, where
pleasure is at least supposed to be possible, are lost in a London
July. Careful observers have long perceived this, but it was made
palpable to every one by the death of the Prince Consort. Since then
the Court has been always in a state of suspended animation, and for a
time it was quite annihilated. But everything went on as usual. A few
people who had no daughters and little money made it an excuse to give
fewer parties, and if very poor, stayed in the country, but upon the
whole the difference was not perceptible. The queen bee was taken away,
but the hive went on.

Refined and original observers have of late objected to English royalty
that it is not splendid enough. They have compared it with the French
Court, which is better in show, which comes to the surface everywhere
so that you cannot help seeing it, which is infinitely and beyond
question the most splendid thing in France. They have said, "that in
old times the English Court took too much of the nation's money, and
spent it ill; but now, when it could be trusted to spend well, it does
not take enough of the nation's money. There are arguments for not
having a Court, and there are arguments for having a splendid Court;
but there are no arguments for having a mean Court. It is better to
spend a million in dazzling when you wish to dazzle, than
three-quarters of a million in trying to dazzle and yet not dazzling."
There may be something in this theory; it may be that the Court of
England is not quite as gorgeous as we might wish to see it. But no
comparison must ever be made between it and the French Court. The
Emperor represents a different idea from the Queen. He is not the head
of the State; he IS the State. The theory of his Government is that
every one in France is equal, and that the Emperor embodies the
principle of equality. The greater you make him, the less, and
therefore the more equal, you make all others. He is magnified that
others may be dwarfed. The very contrary is the principle of English
royalty. As in politics it would lose its principal use if it came
forward into the public arena, so in society if it advertised itself it
would be pernicious. We have voluntary show enough already in London;
we do not wish to have it encouraged and intensified, but quieted and
mitigated. Our Court is but the head of an unequal, competing,
aristocratic society; its splendour would not keep others down, but
incite others to come on. It is of use so long as it keeps others out
of the first place, and is guarded and retired in that place. But it
would do evil if it added a new example to our many examples of showy
wealth--if it gave the sanction of its dignity to the race of
expenditure.

Fourthly. We have come to regard the Crown as the head of our morality.
The virtues of Queen Victoria and the virtues of George III. have sunk
deep into the popular heart. We have come to believe that it is natural
to have a virtuous sovereign, and that the domestic virtues are as
likely to be found on thrones as they are eminent when there. But a
little experience and less thought show that royalty cannot take credit
for domestic excellence. Neither George I., nor George II., nor William
IV. were patterns of family merit; George IV. was a model of family
demerit. The plain fact is, that to the disposition of all others most
likely to go wrong, to an excitable disposition, the place of a
constitutional king has greater temptations than almost any other, and
fewer suitable occupations than almost any other. All the world and all
the glory of it, whatever is most attractive, whatever is most
seductive, has always been offered to the Prince of Wales of the day,
and always will be. It is not rational to expect the best virtue where
temptation is applied in the most trying form at the frailest time of
human life. The occupations of a constitutional monarch are grave,
formal, important, but never exciting; they have nothing to stir eager
blood, awaken high imagination, work off wild thoughts. On men like
George III., with a predominant taste for business occupations, the
routine duties of constitutional royalty have doubtless a calm and
chastening effect. The insanity with which he struggled, and in many
cases struggled very successfully, during many years, would probably
have burst out much oftener but for the sedative effect of sedulous
employment. But how few princes have ever felt the anomalous impulse
for real work; how uncommon is that impulse anywhere; how little are
the circumstances of princes calculated to foster it; how little can it
be relied on as an ordinary breakwater to their habitual temptations!
Grave and careful men may have domestic virtues on a constitutional
throne, but even these fail sometimes, and to imagine that men of more
eager temperaments will commonly produce them, is to expect grapes from
thorns and figs from thistles.

Lastly, constitutional royalty has the function which I insisted on at
length in my last essay, and which, though it is by far the greatest, I
need not now enlarge upon again. It acts as a DISGUISE. It enables our
real rulers to change without heedless people knowing it. The masses of
Englishmen are not fit for an elective government; if they knew how
near they were to it, they would be surprised, and almost tremble.

Of a like nature is the value of constitutional royalty in times of
transition. The greatest of all helps to the substitution of a Cabinet
government for a preceding absolute monarchy is the accession of a king
favourable to such a government, and pledged to it. Cabinet government,
when new, is weak in time of trouble. The Prime Minister--the chief on
whom everything depends, who must take responsibility if any one is to
take it, who must use force if any one is to use it--is not fixed in
power. He holds his place, by the essence of the Government, with some
uncertainty. Among a people well-accustomed to such a Government, such
a functionary may be bold: he may rely, if not on the Parliament, on
the nation which understands and values him. But when that Government
has only recently been introduced, it is difficult for such a Minister
to be as bold as he ought to be. His power rests too much on human
reason, and too little on human instinct. The traditional strength of
the hereditary monarch is at these times of incalculable use. It would
have been impossible for England to get through the first years after
1688 but for the singular ability of William III. It would have been
impossible for Italy to have attained and kept her freedom without the
help of Victor Emmanuel: neither the work of Cavour nor the work of
Garibaldi were more necessary than his. But the failure of Louis
Philippe to use his reserve power as constitutional monarch is the most
instructive proof how great that reserve power is. In February, 1848,
Guizot was weak because his tenure of office was insecure. Louis
Philippe should have made that tenure certain. Parliamentary reform
might afterwards have been conceded to instructed opinion, but nothing
ought to have been conceded to the mob. The Parisian populace ought to
have been put down, as Guizot wished. If Louis Philippe had been a fit
king to introduce free government, he would have strengthened his
Ministers when they were the instruments of order, even if he
afterwards discarded them when order was safe, and policy could be
discussed. But he was one of the cautious men who are "noted" to fail
in old age: though of the largest experience and of great ability, he
failed and lost his crown for want of petty and momentary energy, which
at such a crisis a plain man would have at once put forth.

Such are the principal modes in which the institution of royalty by its
august aspect influences mankind, and in the English state of
civilisation they are invaluable. Of the actual business of the
sovereign--the real work the Queen does--I shall speak in my next paper.


II.

The House of Commons has inquired into most things, but has never had a
committee on "the Queen". There is no authentic blue-book to say what
she does. Such an investigation cannot take place; but if it could, it
would probably save her much vexatious routine, and many toilsome and
unnecessary hours.

The popular theory of the English Constitution involves two errors as
to the sovereign. First, in its oldest form at least, it considers him
as an "Estate of the Realm," a separate co-ordinate authority with the
House of Lords and the House of Commons. This and much else the
sovereign once was, but this he is no longer. That authority could only
be exercised by a monarch with a legislative veto. He should be able to
reject bills, if not as the House of Commons rejects them, at least as
the House of Peers rejects them. But the Queen has no such veto. She
must sign her own death-warrant if the two Houses unanimously send it
up to her. It is a fiction of the past to ascribe to her legislative
power. She has long ceased to have any. Secondly, the ancient theory
holds that the Queen is the executive. The American Constitution was
made upon a most careful argument, and most of that argument assumes
the king to be the administrator of the English Constitution, and an
unhereditary substitute for him--viz., a president--to be peremptorily
necessary. Living across the Atlantic, and misled by accepted
doctrines, the acute framers of the Federal Constitution, even after
the keenest attention, did not perceive the Prime Minister to be the
principal executive of the British Constitution, and the sovereign a
cog in the mechanism. There is, indeed, much excuse for the American
legislators in the history of that time. They took their idea of our
Constitution from the time when they encountered it. But in the
so-called Government of Lord North, George III. was the Government.
Lord North was not only his appointee, but his agent. The Minister
carried on a war which he disapproved and hated, because it was a war
which his sovereign approved and liked. Inevitably, therefore, the
American Convention believed the King, from whom they had suffered, to
be the real executive, and not the Minister, from whom they had not
suffered.

If we leave literary theory, and look to our actual old law, it is
wonderful how much the sovereign can do. A few years ago the Queen very
wisely attempted to make life peers, and the House of Lords very
unwisely, and contrary to its own best interests, refused to admit her
claim. They said her power had decayed into non-existence; she once had
it, they allowed, but it had ceased by long disuse. If any one will run
over the pages of Comyn's Digest or any other such book, title
"Prerogative," he will find the Queen has a hundred such powers which
waver between reality and desuetude, and which would cause a protracted
and very interesting legal argument if she tried to exercise them. Some
good lawyer ought to write a careful book to say which of these powers
are really usable, and which are obsolete. There is no authentic
explicit information as to what the Queen can do, any more than of what
she does.

In the bare superficial theory of free institutions this is undoubtedly
a defect. Every power in a popular Government ought to be known. The
whole notion of such a Government is that the political people--the
governing people--rules as it thinks fit. All the acts of every
administration are to be canvassed by it; it is to watch if such acts
seem good, and in some manner or other to interpose if they seem not
good. But it cannot judge if it is to be kept in ignorance; it cannot
interpose if it does not know. A secret prerogative is an
anomaly--perhaps the greatest of anomalies. That secrecy is, however,
essential to the utility of English royalty as it now is. Above all
things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about
it you cannot reverence it. When there is a select committee on the
Queen, the charm of royalty will be gone. Its mystery is its life. We
must not let in daylight upon magic. We must not bring the Queen into
the combat of politics, or she will cease to be reverenced by all
combatants; she will become one combatant among many. The existence of
this secret power is, according to abstract theory, a defect in our
constitutional polity, but it is a defect incident to a civilisation
such as ours, where august and therefore unknown powers are needed, as
well as known and serviceable powers.

If we attempt to estimate the working of this inner power by the
evidence of those, whether dead or living, who have been brought in
contact with it, we shall find a singular difference. Both the
courtiers of George III. and the courtiers of Queen Victoria are agreed
as to the magnitude of the royal influence. It is with both an accepted
secret doctrine that the Crown does more than it seems. But there is a
wide discrepancy in opinion as to the quality of that action. Mr. Fox
did not scruple to describe the hidden influence of George III. as the
undetected agency of "an infernal spirit". The action of the Crown at
that period was the dread and terror of Liberal politicians. But now
the best Liberal politicians say, "WE shall never know, but when
history is written our children may know, what we owe to the Queen and
Prince Albert". The mystery of the Constitution, which used to be hated
by our calmest, most thoughtful, and instructed statesmen, is now loved
and reverenced by them.

Before we try to account for this change, there is one part of the
duties of the Queen which should be struck out of the discussion. I
mean the formal part. The Queen has to assent to and sign countless
formal documents, which contain no matter of policy, of which the
purport is insignificant, which any clerk could sign as well. One great
class of documents George III. used to read before he signed them, till
Lord Thurlow told him, "It was nonsense his looking at them, for he
could not understand them". But the worst case is that of commissions
in the army. Till an Act passed only three years since the Queen used
to sign ALL military commissions, and she still signs all fresh
commissions. The inevitable and natural consequence is that such
commissions were, and to some extent still are, in arrears by
thousands. Men have often been known to receive their commissions for
the first time years after they have left the service. If the Queen had
been an ordinary officer she would long since have complained, and long
since have been relieved of this slavish labour. A cynical statesman is
said to have defended it on the ground "that you MAY have a fool for a
sovereign, and then it would be desirable he should have plenty of
occupation in which he can do no harm". But it is in truth childish to
heap formal duties of business upon a person who has of necessity so
many formal duties of society. It is a remnant of the old days when
George III. would know everything, however trivial, and assent to
everything, however insignificant. These labours of routine may be
dismissed from the discussions. It is not by them that the sovereign
acquires his authority either for evil or for good.

The best mode of testing what we owe to the Queen is to make a vigorous
effort of the imagination, and see how we should get on without her.
Let us strip Cabinet government of all its accessories, let us reduce
it to its two necessary constituents--a representative assembly (a
House of Commons) and a Cabinet appointed by that assembly--and examine
how we should manage with them only. We are so little accustomed to
analyse the Constitution; we are so used to ascribe the whole effect of
the Constitution to the whole Constitution, that a great many people
will imagine it to be impossible that a nation should thrive or even
live with only these two simple elements. But it is upon that
possibility that the general imitability of the English Government
depends. A monarch that can be truly reverenced, a House of Peers that
can be really respected, are historical accidents nearly peculiar to
this one island, and entirely peculiar to Europe. A new country, if it
is to be capable of a Cabinet government, if it is not to degrade
itself to Presidential government, must create that Cabinet out of its
native resources--must not rely on these Old World debris.

Many modes might be suggested by which a Parliament might do in
appearance what our Parliament does in reality, viz., appoint a
Premier. But I prefer to select the simplest of all modes. We shall
then see the bare skeleton of this polity, perceive in what it differs
from the royal form, and be quite free from the imputation of having
selected an unduly charming and attractive substitute.

Let us suppose the House of Commons--existing alone and by itself--to
appoint the Premier quite simply, just as the shareholders of a railway
choose a director. At each vacancy, whether caused by death or
resignation, let any member or members have the right of nominating a
successor; after a proper interval, such as the time now commonly
occupied by a Ministerial crisis, ten days or a fortnight, let the
members present vote for the candidate they prefer; then let the
Speaker count the votes, and the candidate with the greatest number be
Premier. This mode of election would throw the whole choice into the
hands of party organisation, just as our present mode does, except in
so far as the Crown interferes with it; no outsider would ever be
appointed, because the immense number of votes which every great party
brings into the field would far outnumber every casual and petty
minority. The Premier should not be appointed for a fixed time, but
during good behaviour or the pleasure of Parliament. Mutatis mutandis,
subject to the differences now to be investigated, what goes on now
would go on then. The Premier then, as now, must resign upon a vote of
want of confidence, but the volition of Parliament would then be the
overt and single force in the selection of a successor, whereas it is
now the predominant though latent force.

It will help the discussion very much if we divide it into three parts.
The whole course of a representative Government has three
stages--first, when a Ministry is appointed; next, during its
continuance; last, when it ends. Let us consider what is the exact use
of the Queen at each of these stages, and how our present form of
government differs in each, whether for good or for evil from that
simpler form of Cabinet government which might exist without her.

At the beginning of an administration there would not be much
difference between the royal and unroyal species of Cabinet governments
when there were only two great parties in the State, and when the
greater of those parties was thoroughly agreed within itself who should
be its Parliamentary leader, and who therefore should be its Premier.
The sovereign must now accept that recognised leader; and if the choice
were directly made by the House of Commons, the House must also choose
him; its supreme section, acting compactly and harmoniously, would sway
its decisions without substantial resistance, and perhaps without even
apparent competition. A predominant party, rent by no intestine
demarcation, would be despotic. In such a case Cabinet government would
go on without friction whether there was a Queen or whether there was
no Queen. The best sovereign could then achieve no good, and the worst
effect no harm.

But the difficulties are far greater when the predominant party is not
agreed who should be its leader. In the royal form of Cabinet
government the sovereign then has sometimes a substantial selection; in
the unroyal, who would choose? There must be a meeting at "Willis's
Rooms"; there must be that sort of interior despotism of the majority
over the minority within the party, by which Lord John Russell in 1859
was made to resign his pretensions to the supreme government, and to be
content to serve as a subordinate to Lord Palmerston. The tacit
compression which a party anxious for office would exercise over
leaders who divided its strength, would be used and must be used.
Whether such a party would always choose precisely the best man may
well be doubted. In a party once divided it is very difficult to secure
unanimity in favour of the very person whom a disinterested bystander
would recommend. All manner of jealousies and enmities are immediately
awakened, and it is always difficult, often impossible, to get them to
sleep again. But though such a party might not select the very best
leader, they have the strongest motiv

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