which falls momentarily or provisionally upon the Sovereign; it is the
dismissal of an existing Ministry, and the appointment of a new one.
This act is usually performed with the aid drawn from authentic
manifestations of public opinion, mostly such as are obtained through
the votes or conduct of the House of Commons. Since the reign of George
III there has been but one change of Ministry in which the Monarch acted
without the support of these indications. It was when William IV, in
1834, dismissed the Government of Lord Melbourne, which was known to be
supported, though after a lukewarm fashion, by a large majority of the
existing House of Commons. But the royal responsibility was, according
to the doctrine of our Constitution, completely taken over, _ex post
facto_, by Sir Robert Peel, as the person who consented, on the call of
the King, to take Lord Melbourne's office. Thus, though the act was
rash, and hard to justify, the doctrine of personal immunity was in no
way endangered. And here we may notice, that in theory an absolute
personal immunity implies a correlative limitation of power, greater
than is always found in practice. It can hardly be said that the King's
initiative left to Sir R. Peel a freedom perfectly unimpaired. And, most
certainly, it was a very real exercise of personal power. The power did
not suffice for its end, which was to overset the Liberal predominance;
but it very nearly sufficed. Unconditionally entitled to dismiss the
Ministers, the Sovereign can, of course, choose his own opportunity. He
may defy the Parliament, if he can count upon the people. William IV, in
the year 1834, had neither Parliament nor people with him. His act was
within the limits of the Constitution, for it was covered by the
responsibility of the acceding Ministry. But it reduced the Liberal
majority from a number considerably beyond three hundred to about
thirty; and it constituted an exceptional but very real and large action
on the politics of the country, by the direct will of the King. I speak
of the immediate effects. Its eventual result may have been different,
for it converted a large disjointed mass into a smaller but organized
and sufficient force, which held the fortress of power for the six
years 1835-41. On this view it may be said that, if the Royal
intervention anticipated and averted decay from natural causes, then
with all its immediate success, it defeated its own real aim.
But this power of dismissing a Ministry at will, large as it may be
under given circumstances, is neither the safest nor the only power
which, in the ordinary course of things, falls Constitutionally to the
personal share of the wearer of the crown. He is entitled, on all
subjects coming before the Ministry, to knowledge and opportunities of
discussion, unlimited save by the iron necessities of business. Though
decisions must ultimately conform to the sense of those who are to be
responsible for them, yet their business is to inform and persuade the
Sovereign, not to overrule him. Were it possible for him, within the
limits of human time and strength, to enter actively into all public
transactions, he would be fully entitled to do so. What is actually
submitted is supposed to be the most fruitful and important part, the
cream of affairs. In the discussion of them, the Monarch has more than
one advantage over his advisers. He is permanent, they are fugitive; he
speaks from the vantage-ground of a station unapproachably higher; he
takes a calm and leisurely survey, while they are worried with the
preparatory stages, and their force is often impaired by the pressure of
countless detail. He may be, therefore, a weighty factor in all
deliberations of State. Every discovery of a blot, that the studies of
the Sovereign in the domain of business enable him to make, strengthens
his hands and enhances his authority. It is plain, then, that there is
abundant scope for mental activity to be at work under the gorgeous
robes of Royalty.
This power spontaneously takes the form of influence; and the amount of
it depends on a variety of circumstances; on talent, experience, tact,
weight of character, steady, untiring industry, and habitual presence at
the seat of government. In proportion as any of these might fail, the
real and legitimate influence of the Monarch over the course of affairs
would diminish; in proportion as they attain to fuller action, it would
increase. It is a moral, not a coercive, influence. It operates through
the will and reason of the Ministry, not over or against them. It would
be an evil and a perilous day for the Monarchy, were any prospective
possessor of the Crown to assume or claim for himself final, or
preponderating, or even independent power, in any one department of the
State. The ideas and practice of the time of George III, whose will in
certain matters limited the action of the Ministers, cannot be revived,
otherwise than by what would be, on their part, nothing less than a base
compliance, a shameful subserviency, dangerous to the public weal, and
in the highest degree disloyal to the dynasty. Because, in every free
State, for every public act, some one must be responsible; and the
question is, Who shall it be? The British Constitution answers: The
Minister, and the Minister exclusively. That he may be responsible, all
action must be fully shared by him. Sole action, for the Sovereign,
would mean undefended, unprotected action; the armor of irresponsibility
would not cover the whole body against sword or spear; a head would
project beyond the awning, and would invite a sunstroke.
The reader, then, will clearly see that there is no distinction more
vital to the practice of the British Constitution, or to a right
judgment upon it, than the distinction between the Sovereign and the
Crown. The Crown has large prerogatives, endless functions essential to
the daily action, and even the life, of the State. To place them in the
hands of persons who should be mere tools in a Royal will, would expose
those powers to constant unsupported collision with the living forces of
the nation, and to a certain and irremediable crash. They are therefore
entrusted to men, who must be prepared to answer for the use they make
of them. This ring of responsible Ministerial agency forms a fence
around the person of the Sovereign, which has thus far proved
impregnable to all assaults. The august personage, who from time to time
may rest within it, and who may possess the art of turning to the best
account the countless resources of the position, is no dumb and
senseless idol; but, together with real and very large means of
influence upon policy, enjoys the undivided reverence which a great
people feels for its head; and is likewise the first and by far the
weightiest among the forces, which greatly mould, by example and
legitimate authority, the manners, nay the morals, of a powerful
aristocracy and a wealthy and highly trained society. The social
influence of a Sovereign, even if it stood alone, would be an enormous
attribute. The English people are not believers in equality; they do
not, with the famous Declaration of July 4, 1776, think it to be a
self-evident truth that all men are born equal. They hold rather the
reverse of that proposition. At any rate, in practice, they are what I
may call determined inequalitarians; nay, in some cases, even without
knowing it. Their natural tendency, from the very base of British
society, and through all its strongly built gradations, is to look
upward: they are not apt to "untune degree." The Sovereign is the
highest height of the system, is, in that system, like Jupiter among the
Roman gods, first without a second.
"Nec viget quicquam simile aut secundum."[14]
Not, like Mont Blanc, with rivals in his neighborhood; but like Ararat
or Etna, towering alone and unapproachable. The step downward from the
King to the second person in the realm is not like that from the second
to the third: it is more even than a stride, for it traverses a gulf. It
is the wisdom of the British Constitution to lodge the personality of
its chief so high, that none shall under any circumstances be tempted to
vie, no, nor dream of vieing, with it. The office, however, is not
confused, though it is associated, with the person; and the elevation of
official dignity in the Monarch of these realms has now for a testing
period worked well, in conjunction with the limitation of merely
personal power.
In the face of the country, the Sovereign and the Ministers are an
absolute unity. The one may concede to the other; but the limit of
concessions by the Sovereign is at the point where he becomes willing to
try the experiment of changing his Government, and the limit of
concessions by the Minister is at the point where they become unwilling
to bear, what in all circumstances they must bear while they remain
Ministers, the undivided responsibility of all that is done in the
Crown's name. But it is not with the Sovereign only that the Ministry
must be welded into identity. It has a relation to sustain to the House
of Lords; which need not, however, be one of entire unity, for the House
of Lords, though a great power in the State, and able to cause great
embarrassment to an Administration, is not able by a vote to doom it to
capital punishment. Only for fifteen years, out of the last fifty, has
the Ministry of the day possessed the confidence of the House of Lords.
On the confidence of the House of Commons it is immediately and vitally
dependent. This confidence it must always possess, either absolutely
from identity of political color, or relatively and conditionally. This
last case arises when an accidental dislocation of the majority in the
Chamber has put the machine for the moment out of gear, and the unsafe
experiment of a sort of provisional government, doomed on the one hand
to be feeble, or tempted on the other to be dishonest, is tried; much as
the Roman Conclave has sometimes been satisfied with a provisional Pope,
deemed likely to live for the time necessary to reunite the factions of
the prevailing party.
I have said that the Cabinet is essentially the regulator of the
relations between King, Lords, and Commons; exercising functionally the
powers of the first, and incorporated, in the persons of its members,
with the second and the third. It is, therefore, itself a great power.
But let no one suppose it is the greatest. In a balance nicely poised, a
small weight may turn the scale; and the helm that directs the ship is
not stronger than the ship. It is a cardinal axiom of the modern British
Constitution, that the House of Commons is the greatest of the powers
of the State. It might, by a base subserviency, fling itself at the feet
of a Monarch or a Minister; it might, in a season of exhaustion, allow
the slow persistence of the Lords, ever eyeing it as Lancelot was eyed
by Modred, to invade its just province by baffling its action at some
time propitious for the purpose. But no Constitution can anywhere keep
either Sovereign, or Assembly, or nation, true to its trust and to
itself. All that can be done has been done. The Commons are armed with
ample powers of self-defence. If they use their powers properly, they
can only be mastered by a recurrence to the people, and the way in which
the appeal can succeed is by the choice of another House of Commons more
agreeable to the national temper. Thus the sole appeal from the verdict
of the House is a rightful appeal to those from whom it received its
commission.
This superiority in power among the great State forces was, in truth,
established even before the House of Commons became what it now is,
representative of the people throughout its entire area. In the early
part of the century, a large part of its members virtually received
their mandate from members of the Peerage, or from the Crown, or by the
direct action of money on a mere handful of individuals, or, as in
Scotland, for example, from constituencies whose limited numbers and
upper-class sympathies usually shut out popular influences. A real
supremacy belonged to the House as a whole; but the forces of which it
was compounded were not all derived from the people, and the
aristocratic power had found out the secret of asserting itself within
the walls of the popular chamber, in the dress and through the voices of
its members. Many persons of gravity and weight saw great danger in a
measure of change like the first Reform Act, which left it to the Lords
to assert themselves, thereafter, by an external force, instead of
through a share in the internal composition of a body so formidable. But
the result proved that they were sufficiently to exercise, through the
popular will and choice, the power which they had formerly put in action
without its sanction, though within its proper precinct and with its
title falsely inscribed.
The House of Commons is superior, and by far superior, in the force of
its political attributes, to any other single power in the State. But it
is watched; it is criticized; it is hemmed in and about by a multitude
of other forces: the force, first of all, of the House of Lords, the
force of opinion from day to day, particularly of the highly
anti-popular opinion of the leisured men of the metropolis, who, seated
close to the scene of action, wield an influence greatly in excess of
their just claims; the force of the classes and professions; the just
and useful force of the local authorities in their various orders and
places. Never was the great problem more securely solved, which
recognizes the necessity of a paramount power in the body politic to
enable it to move, but requires for it a depository such that it shall
be safe against invasion, and yet inhibited from aggression.
The old theories of a mixed government, and of the three powers, coming
down from the age of Cicero, when set by the side of the living British
Constitution, are cold, crude, and insufficient to a degree that makes
them deceptive. Take them, for example, as represented, fairly enough,
by Voltaire: the picture drawn by him is for us nothing but a puzzle:--
"Aux murs de Vestminster on voit paraître ensemble
Trois pouvoirs étonnés du noeud qui les rassemble,
Les députés du peuple, les grands, et le Roi,
Divisés d' intérêt, réunis par la Loi."[15]
There is here lacking an amalgam, a reconciling power, what may be
called a clearing-house of political forces, which shall draw into
itself every thing, and shall balance and adjust every thing, and
ascertaining the nett result, let it pass on freely for the fulfilment
of the purposes of the great social union. Like a stout buffer-spring,
it receives all shocks, and within it their opposing elements neutralize
one another. This is the function of the British Cabinet. It is perhaps
the most curious formation in the political world of modern times, not
for its dignity, but for its subtlety, its elasticity, and its
many-sided diversity of power. It is the complement of the entire
system; a system which appears to want nothing but a thorough loyalty in
the persons composing its several parts, with a reasonable intelligence,
to insure its bearing, without fatal damage, the wear and tear of ages
yet to come.
It has taken more than a couple of centuries to bring the British
Cabinet to its present accuracy and fulness of development; for the
first rudiments of it may sufficiently be discerned in the reign of
Charles I. Under Charles II it had fairly started from its embryo; and
the name is found both in Clarendon and in the Diary of Pepys.[16] It
was for a long time without a Ministerial head; the King was the head.
While this arrangement subsisted, constitutional government could be but
half established. Of the numerous titles of the Revolution of 1688 to
respect, not the least remarkable is this, that the great families of
the country, and great powers of the State, made no effort, as they
might have done, in the hour of its weakness, to aggrandize themselves
at the expense of the crown. Nevertheless, for various reasons, and
among them because of the foreign origin, and absences from time, of
several Sovereigns, the course of events tended to give force to the
organs of Government actually on the spot, and thus to consolidate, and
also to uplift, this as yet novel creation. So late, however, as the
impeachment of Sir Robert Walpole, his friends thought it expedient to
urge on his behalf, in the House of Lords, that he had never presumed to
constitute himself a Prime-Minister.
The breaking down of the great offices of State by throwing them into
commission, and last among them of the Lord High Treasurership after the
time of Harley, Earl of Oxford, tended, and may probably have been
meant, to prevent or retard the formation of a recognized Chiefship in
the Ministry; which even now we have not learned to designate by a true
English word, though the use of the imported phrase "Premier" is at
least as old as the poetry of Burns. Nor can any thing be more curiously
characteristic of the political genius of the people, than the present
position of this most important official personage. Departmentally, he
is no more than the first-named of five persons, by whom jointly the
powers of the Lord Treasurership are taken to be exercised; he is not
their master, or, otherwise than by mere priority, their head: and he
has no special function or prerogative under the formal Constitution of
the office. He has no official rank except that of Privy Councillor.
Eight members of the Cabinet, including five Secretaries of State, and
several other members of the Government, take official precedence of
him. His rights and duties as head of the Administration are nowhere
recorded. He is almost, if not altogether, unknown to the Statute Law.
Nor is the position of the body, over which he presides, less singular
than his own. The Cabinet wields, with partial exceptions, the powers of
the Privy Council, besides having a standing ground in relation to the
personal will of the Sovereign, far beyond what the Privy Council ever
held or claimed. Yet it has no connection with the Privy Council, except
that every one, on first becoming a member of the Cabinet, is, if not
belonging to it already, sworn a member of that body. There are other
sections of the Privy Council, forming regular Committees for Education
and for Trade. But the Cabinet has not even this degree of formal
sanction, to sustain its existence. It lives and acts simply by
understanding, without a single line of written law or constitution to
determine its relations to the Monarch, or to the Parliament, or to the
nation; or the relations of its members to one another, or to their
head. It sits in the closest secrecy. There is no record of its
proceedings, nor is there any one to hear them, except upon the very
rare occasions when some important functionary, for the most part
military or legal, is introduced, _pro hac vice_, for the purpose of
giving to it necessary information.
Every one of its members acts in no less than three capacities: as
administrator of a department of State; as member of a legislative
chamber; and as a confidential adviser of the Crown. Two at least of
them add to those three characters a fourth; for in each House of
Parliament it is indispensable that one of the principal Ministers
should be what is termed its Leader. This is an office the most
indefinite of all, but not the least important. With very little of
defined prerogative, the Leader suggests, and in a great degree fixes,
the course of all principal matters of business, supervises and keeps in
harmony the action of his colleagues, takes the initiative in matters of
ceremonial procedure, and advises the House in every difficulty as it
arises. The first of these, which would be of but secondary consequence
where the assembly had time enough for all its duties, is of the utmost
weight in our overcharged House of Commons, where, notwithstanding all
its energy and all its diligence, for one thing of consequence that is
done, five or ten are despairingly postponed. The overweight, again, of
the House of Commons is apt, other things being equal, to bring its
Leader inconveniently near in power to a Prime-Minister who is a Peer.
He can play off the House of Commons against his chief; and instances
might be cited, though they are happily most rare, when he has served
him very ugly tricks.
The nicest of all the adjustments involved in the working of the British
Government is that which determines, without formally defining, the
internal relations of the Cabinet. On the one hand, while each Minister
is an adviser of the Crown, the Cabinet is a unity, and none of its
members can advise as an individual, without, or in opposition actual or
presumed to, his colleagues. On the other hand, the business of the
State is a hundred-fold too great in volume to allow of the actual
passing of the whole under the view of the collected Ministry. It is
therefore a prime office of discretion for each Minister to settle what
are the departmental acts in which he can presume the concurrence of his
colleagues, and in what more delicate, or weighty, or peculiar cases, he
must positively ascertain it. So much for the relation of each Minister
to the Cabinet; but here we touch the point which involves another
relation, perhaps the least known of all, his relation to its head.
The head of the British Government is not a Grand Vizier. He has no
powers, properly so called, over his colleagues: on the rare occasions,
when a Cabinet determines its course by the votes of its members, his
vote counts only as one of theirs. But they are appointed and dismissed
by the Sovereign on his advice. In a perfectly organized administration,
such for example as was that of Sir Robert Peel in 1841-6, nothing of
great importance is matured, or would even be projected, in any
department without his personal cognizance; and any weighty business
would commonly go to him before being submitted to the Cabinet. He
reports to the Sovereign its proceedings, and he also has many audiences
of the august occupant of the Throne. He is bound in these reports and
audiences, not to counterwork the Cabinet; not to divide it; not to
undermine the position of any of his colleagues in the Royal favor. If
he departs in any degree from strict adherence to these rules, and uses
his great opportunities to increase his own influence, or pursue aims
not shared by his colleagues, then, unless he is prepared to advise
their dismissal, he not only departs from rule, but commits an act of
treachery and baseness. As the Cabinet stands between the Sovereign and
the Parliament, and is bound to be loyal to both, so he stands between
his colleagues and the Sovereign, and is bound to be loyal to both.
As a rule, the resignation of the First Minister, as if removing the
bond of cohesion in the Cabinet, has the effect of dissolving it. A
conspicuous instance of this was furnished by Sir Robert Peel in 1846;
when the dissolution of the Administration, after it had carried the
repeal of the Corn Laws, was understood to be due not so much to a
united deliberation and decision as to his initiative. The resignation
of any other Minister only creates a vacancy. In certain circumstances,
the balance of forces may be so delicate and susceptible that a single
resignation will break up the Government; but what is the rule in the
one case is the rare exception in the other. The Prime Minister has no
title to override any one of his colleagues in any one of the
departments. So far as he governs them, unless it is done by trick,
which is not to be supposed, he governs them by influence only. But upon
the whole, nowhere in the wide world does so great a substance cast so
small a shadow; nowhere is there a man who has so much power, with so
little to show for it in the way of formal title or prerogative.