Upper House is utterly different. If an able and impartial exterior
king is at hand, this power is best in that king. It is a power only to
be used on great occasions, when the object is immense, and the party
strife unmitigated. This is the conclusive, the swaying power of the
moment, and of course, therefore, it had better be in the hands of a
power both capable and impartial, than of a Premier who must in some
degree be a partisan. The value of a discreet, calm, wise monarch, if
such should happen to be reigning at the acute crisis of a nation's
destiny, is priceless. He may prevent years of tumult, save bloodshed
and civil war, lay up a store of grateful fame to himself, prevent the
accumulated intestine hatred of each party to its opposite. But the
question comes back, Will there be such a monarch just then? What is
the chance of having him just then? What will be the use of the monarch
whom the accidents of inheritance, such as we know them to be, must
upon an average bring us just then?
The answer to these questions is not satisfactory, if we take it from
the little experience we have had in this rare matter. There have been
but two cases at all approaching to a catastrophic creation of
peers--to a creation which would suddenly change the majority of the
Lords--in English history. One was in Queen Anne's time. The majority
of peers in Queen Anne's time were Whig, and by profuse and quick
creations Harley's Ministry changed it to a Tory majority. So great was
the popular effect, that in the next reign one of the most contested
Ministerial proposals was a proposal to take the power of indefinite
peer creation from the Crown, and to make the number of Lords fixed, as
that of the Commons is fixed. But the sovereign had little to do with
the matter. Queen Anne was one of the smallest people ever set in a
great place. Swift bitterly and justly said "she had not a store of
amity by her for more than one friend at a time," and just then her
affection was concentrated on a waiting-maid. Her waiting-maid told her
to make peers, and she made them. But of large thought and
comprehensive statesmanship she was as destitute as Mrs. Masham. She
supported a bad Ministry by the most extreme of measures, and she did
it on caprice. The case of William IV. is still more instructive. He
was a very conscientious king, but at the same time an exceedingly weak
king. His correspondence with Lord Grey on this subject fills more than
half a large volume, or rather his secretary's correspondence, for he
kept a very clever man to write what he thought, or at least what those
about him thought. It is a strange instance of high-placed weakness and
conscientious vacillation. After endless letters the king consents to
make a REASONABLE number of peers if required to pass the second
reading of the Reform Bill, but owing to desertion of the "Waverers"
from the Tories, the second reading is carried without it by nine, and
then the king refuses to make peers, or at least enough peers when a
vital amendment is carried by Lord Lyndhurst, which would have
destroyed, and was meant to destroy the Bill. In consequence, there was
a tremendous crisis and nearly a revolution. A more striking example of
well-meaning imbecility is scarcely to be found in history. No one who
reads it carefully will doubt that the discretionary power of making
peers would have been far better in Lord Grey's hands than in the
king's. It was the uncertainty whether the king would exercise it, and
how far he would exercise it, that mainly animated the opposition. In
fact, you may place power in weak hands at a revolution, but you cannot
keep it in weak hands. It runs out of them into strong ones. An
ordinary hereditary sovereign--a William IV., or a George IV.--is unfit
to exercise the peer-creating power when most wanted. A half-insane
king, like George III., would be worse. He might use it by
unaccountable impulse when not required, and refuse to use it out of
sullen madness when required.
The existence of a fancied check on the Premier is in truth an evil,
because it prevents the enforcement of a real check. It would be easy
to provide by law that an extraordinary number of peers--say more than
ten annually--should not be created except on a vote of some large
majority, suppose three-fourths of the Lower House. This would ensure
that the Premier should not use the reserve force of the constitution
as if it were an ordinary force; that he should not use it except when
the whole nation fixedly wished it; that it should be kept for a
revolution, not expended on administration; and it would ensure that he
should then have it to use. Queen Anne's case and William IV.'s case
prove that neither object is certainly attained by entrusting this
critical and extreme force to the chance idiosyncrasies and habitual
mediocrity of an hereditary sovereign.
It may be asked why I argue at such length a question in appearance so
removed from practice, and in one point of view so irrelevant to my
subject. No one proposes to remove Queen Victoria; if any one is in a
safe place on earth, she is in a safe place. In these very essays it
has been shown that the mass of our people would obey no one else, that
the reverence she excites is the potential energy--as science now
speaks--out of which all minor forces are made, and from which lesser
functions take their efficiency. But looking not to the present hour,
and this single country, but to the world at large and coming times, no
question can be more practical.
What grows upon the world is a certain matter-of-factness. The test of
each century, more than of the century before, is the test of results.
New countries are arising all over the world where there are no fixed
sources of reverence; which have to make them; which have to create
institutions which must generate loyalty by conspicuous utility. This
matter-of-factness is the growth even in Europe of the two greatest and
newest intellectual agencies of our time. One of these is business. We
see so much of the material fruits of commerce that we forget its
mental fruits. It begets a mind desirous of things, careless of ideas,
not acquainted with the niceties of words. In all labour there should
be profit, is its motto. It is not only true that we have "left swords
for ledgers," but war itself is made as much by the ledger as by the
sword. The soldier--that is, the great soldier--of to-day is not a
romantic animal, dashing at forlorn hopes, animated by frantic
sentiment, full of fancies as to a lady-love or a sovereign; but a
quiet, grave man, busied in charts, exact in sums, master of the art of
tactics, occupied in trivial detail; thinking, as the Duke of
Wellington was said to do, MOST of the shoes of his soldiers; despising
all manner of eclat and eloquence; perhaps, like Count Moltke, "silent
in seven languages". We have reached a "climate" of opinion where
figures rule, where our very supporter of Divine right, as we deemed
him, our Count Bismarck, amputates kings right and left, applies the
test of results to each, and lets none live who are not to do
something. There has in truth been a great change during the last five
hundred years in the predominant occupations of the ruling part of
mankind; formerly they passed their time either in exciting action or
inanimate repose. A feudal baron had nothing between war and the
chase--keenly animating things both--and what was called "inglorious
ease". Modern life is scanty in excitements, but incessant in quiet
action. Its perpetual commerce is creating a "stock-taking" habit--the
habit of asking each man, thing, and institution, "Well, what have you
done since I saw you last?"
Our physical science, which is becoming the dominant culture of
thousands, and which is beginning to permeate our common literature to
an extent which few watch enough, quite tends the same way. The two
peculiarities are its homeliness and its inquisitiveness; its value for
the most "stupid" facts, as one used to call them, and its incessant
wish for verification--to be sure, by tiresome seeing and hearing, that
they are facts. The old excitement of thought has half died out, or
rather it is diffused in quiet pleasure over a life instead of being
concentrated in intense and eager spasms. An old philosopher--a
Descartes, suppose--fancied that out of primitive truths, which he
could by ardent excogitation know, he might by pure deduction evolve
the entire universe. Intense self-examination, and intense reason
would, he thought, make out everything. The soul "itself by itself,"
could tell all it wanted if it would be true to its sublimer isolation.
The greatest enjoyment possible to man was that which this philosophy
promises its votaries--the pleasure of being always right, and always
reasoning--without ever being bound to look at anything. But our most
ambitious schemes of philosophy now start quite differently. Mr. Darwin
begins:--
"When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with
certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting
South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the
past inhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in the
latter chapters of this volume, seemed to throw some light on the
origin of species--that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by
one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me,
in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by
patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could
possibly have any bearing on it. After five years' work I allowed
myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these
I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions which then seemed
to me probable: from that period to the present day I have steadily
pursued the same object. I hope that I may be excused for entering on
these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been
hasty in coming to a decision."
If he hopes finally to solve his great problem, it is by careful
experiments in pigeon-fancying, and other sorts of artificial
variety-making. His hero is not a self-enclosed, excited philosopher,
but "that most skilful breeder, Sir John Sebright, who used to say,
with respect to pigeons, that he would produce any given feathers in
three years, but it would take him six years to obtain a head and a
beak". I am not saying that the new thought is better than the old; it
is no business of mine to say anything about that; I only wish to bring
home to the mind, as nothing but instances can bring it home, how
matter-of-fact, how petty, as it would at first sight look, even our
most ambitious science has become.
In the new communities which our emigrating habit now constantly
creates, this prosaic turn of mind is intensified. In the American mind
and in the colonial mind there is, as contrasted with the old English
mind, a LITERALNESS, a tendency to say, "The facts are so-and-so,
whatever may be thought or fancied about them". We used before the
civil war to say that the Americans worshipped the almighty dollar; we
now know that they can scatter money almost recklessly when they will.
But what we meant was half right--they worship visible value: obvious,
undeniable, intrusive result. And in Australia and New Zealand the same
turn comes uppermost. It grows from the struggle with the wilderness.
Physical difficulty is the enemy of early communities, and an incessant
conflict with it for generations leaves a mark of reality on the
mind--a painful mark almost to us, used to impalpable fears and the
half-fanciful dangers of an old and complicated society. The "new
Englands" of all latitudes are bare-minded (if I may so say) as
compared with the "old".
When, therefore, the new communities of the colonised world have to
choose a government, they must choose one in which ALL the institutions
are of an obvious evident utility. We catch the Americans smiling at
our Queen with her secret mystery, and our Prince of Wales with his
happy inaction. It is impossible, in fact, to convince their prosaic
minds that constitutional royalty is a rational government, that it is
suited to a new age and an unbroken country, that those who start
afresh can start with it. The princelings who run about the world with
excellent intentions, but an entire ignorance of business, are to them
a locomotive advertisement that this sort of government is European in
its limitations and mediaeval in its origin; that though it has yet a
great part to play in the old States, it has no place or part in new
States. The realisme impitoyable which good critics find in a most
characteristic part of the literature of the nineteenth century, is to
be found also in its politics. An ostentatious utility must
characterise its creations.
The deepest interest, therefore, attaches to the problem of this essay.
If hereditary royalty had been essential to Parliamentary government,
we might well have despaired of that government. But accurate
investigation shows that this royalty is not essential; that, upon an
average, it is not even in a high degree useful; that though a king
with high courage and fine discretion--a king with a genius for the
place--is always useful, and at rare moments priceless, yet that a
common king, a king such as birth brings, is of no use at difficult
crises, while in the common course of things his aid is neither likely
nor required--he will do nothing, and he need do nothing. But we
happily find that a new country need not fall back into the fatal
division of powers incidental to a Presidential government; it may, if
other conditions serve, obtain the ready, well-placed, identical sort
of sovereignty which belongs to the English Constitution, under the
unroyal form of Parliamentary government.
NO. VIII.
THE PREREQUISITES OF CABINET GOVERNMENT, AND THE PECULIAR FORM WHICH
THEY HAVE ASSUMED IN ENGLAND.
Cabinet government is rare because its prerequisites are many. It
requires the co-existence of several national characteristics which are
not often found together in the world, and which should be perceived
more distinctly than they often are. It is fancied that the possession
of a certain intelligence, and a few simple virtues, are the sole
requisites. The mental and moral qualities are necessary, but much else
is necessary also. A Cabinet government is the government of a
committee selected by the legislature, and there are therefore a double
set of conditions to it: first, those which are essential to all
elective governments as such; and second, those which are requisite to
this particular elective government. There are prerequisites for the
genus, and additional ones for the species.
The first prerequisite of elective government is the MUTUAL CONFIDENCE
of the electors. We are so accustomed to submit to be ruled by elected
Ministers, that we are apt to fancy all mankind would readily be so
too. Knowledge and civilisation have at least made this progress, that
we instinctively, without argument, almost without consciousness, allow
a certain number of specified persons to choose our rulers for us. It
seems to us the simplest thing in the world. But it is one of the
gravest things.
The peculiar marks of semi-barbarous people are diffused distrust and
indiscriminate suspicion. People, in all but the most favoured times
and places, are rooted to the places where they were born, think the
thoughts of those places, can endure no other thoughts. The next parish
even is suspected. Its inhabitants have different usages, almost
imperceptibly different, but yet different; they speak a varying
accent; they use a few peculiar words; tradition says that their faith
is dubious. And if the next parish is a little suspected, the next
county is much more suspected. Here is a definite beginning of new
maxims, new thoughts, new ways: the immemorial boundary mark begins in
feeling a strange world. And if the next county is dubious, a remote
county is untrustworthy. "Vagrants come from thence," men know, and
they know nothing else. The inhabitants of the north speak a dialect
different from the dialect of the south: they have other laws, another
aristocracy, another life. In ages when distant territories are blanks
in the mind, when neighbourhood is a sentiment, when locality is a
passion, concerted co-operation between remote regions is impossible
even on trivial matters. Neither would rely enough upon the good faith,
good sense, and good judgment of the other. Neither could enough
calculate on the other.
And if such co-operation is not to be expected in trivial matters, it
is not to be thought of in the most vital matter of government--the
choice of the executive ruler. To fancy that Northumberland in the
thirteenth century would have consented to ally itself with
Somersetshire for the choice of a chief magistrate is absurd; it would
scarcely have allied itself to choose a hangman. Even now, if it were
palpably explained, neither district would like it. But no one says at
a county election, "The object of this present meeting is to choose our
delegate to what the Americans call the 'Electoral College,' to the
assembly which names our first magistrate--our substitute for their
President. Representatives from this county will meet representatives
from other counties, from cities and boroughs, and proceed to choose
our rulers." Such bald exposition would have been impossible in old
times; it would be considered queer, eccentric, if it were used now.
Happily, the process of election is so indirect and hidden, and the
introduction of that process was so gradual and latent, that we
scarcely perceive the immense political trust we repose in each other.
The best mercantile credit seems to those who give it, natural, simple,
obvious; they do not argue about it, or think about it. The best
political credit is analogous; we trust our countrymen without
remembering that we trust them.
A second and very rare condition of an elective government is a CALM
national mind--a tone of mind sufficiently staple to bear the necessary
excitement of conspicuous revolutions. No barbarous, no semi-civilised
nation has ever possessed this. The mass of uneducated men could not
now in England be told "go to, choose your rulers;" they would go wild;
their imaginations would fancy unreal dangers, and the attempt at
election would issue in some forcible usurpation. The incalculable
advantage of august institutions in a free state is, that they prevent
this collapse. The excitement of choosing our rulers is prevented by
the apparent existence of an unchosen ruler. The poorer and more
ignorant classes--those who would most feel excitement, who would most
be misled by excitement--really believe that the Queen governs. You
could not explain to them the recondite difference between "reigning"
and "governing"; the words necessary to express it do not exist in
their dialect; the ideas necessary to comprehend it do not exist in
their minds. The separation of principal power from principal station
is a refinement which they could not even conceive. They fancy they are
governed by an hereditary Queen, a Queen by the grace of God, when they
are really governed by a Cabinet and a Parliament--men like themselves,
chosen by themselves. The conspicuous dignity awakens the sentiment of
reverence, and men, often very undignified, seize the occasion to
govern by means of it.
Lastly. The third condition of all elective government is what I may
call RATIONALITY, by which I mean a power involving intelligence, but
yet distinct from it. A whole people electing its rulers must be able
to form a distinct conception of distant objects. Mostly, the
"divinity" that surrounds a king altogether prevents anything like a
steady conception of him. You fancy that the object of your loyalty is
as much elevated above you by intrinsic nature as he is by extrinsic
position; you deify him in sentiment, as once men deified him in
doctrine. This illusion has been and still is of incalculable benefit
to the human race. It prevents, indeed, men from choosing their rulers;
you cannot invest with that loyal illusion a man who was yesterday what
you are, who to-morrow may be so again, whom you chose to be what he
is. But though this superstition prevents the election of rulers, it
renders possible the existence of unelected rulers. Untaught people
fancy that their king, crowned with the holy crown, anointed with the
oil of Rheims, descended of the House of Plantagenet, is a different
sort of being from any one not descended of the Royal House--not
crowned--not anointed. They believe that there is ONE man whom by
mystic right they should obey; and therefore they do obey him. It is
only in later times, when the world is wider, its experience larger,
and its thought colder, that the plain rule of a palpably chosen ruler
is even possible.
These conditions narrowly restrict elective government. But the
prerequisites of a Cabinet government are rarer still; it demands not
only the conditions I have mentioned, but the possibility likewise of a
good legislature--a legislature competent to elect a sufficient
administration.
Now a competent legislature is very rare. ANY permanent legislature at
all, any constantly acting mechanism for enacting and repealing laws,
is, though it seems to us so natural, quite contrary to the inveterate
conceptions of mankind. The great majority of nations conceive of their
law, either as something Divinely given, and therefore unalterable, or
as a fundamental habit, inherited from the past to be transmitted to
the future. The English Parliament, of which the prominent functions
are now legislative, was not all so once. It was rather a PRESERVATIVE
body. The custom of the realm--the aboriginal transmitted law--the law
which was in the breast of the judges, could not be altered without the
consent of Parliament, and therefore everybody felt sure it would not
be altered except in grave, peculiar, and anomalous cases. The VALUED
use of Parliament was not half so much to alter the law, as to prevent
the laws being altered. And such too was its real use. In early
societies it matters much more that the law should be fixed than that
it should be good. Any law which the people of ignorant times enact is
sure to involve many misconceptions, and to cause many evils.
Perfection in legislation is not to be looked for, and is not, indeed,
much wanted in a rude, painful, confined life. But such an age covets
fixity. That men should enjoy the fruits of their labour, that the law
of property should be known, that the law of marriage should be known,
that the whole course of life should be kept in a calculable track is
the summum bonum of early ages, the first desire of semi-civilised
mankind. In that age men do not want to have their laws adapted, but to
have their laws steady. The passions are so powerful, force so eager,
the social bond so weak, that the august spectacle of an all but
unalterable law is necessary to preserve society. In the early stages
of human society all change is thought an evil. And MOST change is an
evil. The conditions of life are so simple and so unvarying that any
decent sort of rules suffice so long as men know what they are. Custom
is the first check on tyranny; that fixed routine of social life at
which modern innovations chafe, and by which modern improvement is
impeded, is the primitive check on base power. The perception of
political expediency has then hardly begun; the sense of abstract
justice is weak and vague; and a rigid adherence to the fixed mould of
transmitted usage is essential to an unmarred, unspoiled, unbroken life.