'It is impossible,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'to reconcile any, even the smallest, abatement of this doctrine with the perfect, absolute immunity of the Sovereign from consequences. There can in England be no disloyalty more gross in its effects than the superstition which affects to assign to the Sovereign a separate, and, so far as separate, a transcendental sphere of political action.' That the Minister may be responsible, all action must be fully shared by him. Sole action by the Sovereign would mean undefended, unprotected action; the armour of irresponsibility would not cover the whole body against sword or spear; a head would project above the awning and invite a sunstroke.'

We turn next to the Cabinet, which constitutes from day to day the true centre of gravity for the working system of the State.' The Ministers who compose it are the ultimate regulators of the relations between the Crown on the one side, and the people, through the Houses of Parliament, on the other.' Upon them it devolves to provide that the Houses of Parliament shall loyally counsel and serve the Crown, and that the Crown shall act strictly in accordance with its obligations to the nation.' They have to listen deferentially to what is said in both quarters, the 'conflicting tides' meeting and clashing in their unhappy persons, and with them it rests to say the final word. They have no coercive power. It is their duty to 'inform and persuade' the Sovereign, who enjoys more than one advantage over them and exercises a degree of influence proportioned to his capacity, experience, and habitual residence at the seat of power. The Sovereign and his Ministers may make concessions to each other, 'but the limit of concessions by the Sovereign is at the point where he is willing to try the experiment of changing his government; and the limit of concessions by the Ministers is at the point where they become unwilling to bear what on the whole they must bear so long as they remain Ministers, the undivided responsibility of all that is done in the Crown's name.' In the time of George the Third the will of the Sovereign in certain matters limited the action of his Ministers; but this practice cannot be revived' otherwise than by what would be on their part a base compliance, a shameful subserviency, dangerous to the public weal, and in the highest degree disloyal to the dynasty.' As regards the internal relations of the Ministry, the head of the Government is not a Grand Vizier.' It is his business to report the proceedings of the Cabinet to the Sovereign; but he is bound 'not to counterwork the Cabinet, nor to divide it, nor to undermine any of his colleagues in the royal favour.' If he departs in any degree from these rules he commits an act of treachery and baseness.' But the Cabinet lives and acts by simple understanding, without a single line of written law or constitution to determine its relations to the Monarch, or to Parliament, or to the nation, or the relations of the members to one another or to their

head.' In a word, the Cabinet is squeezable and malleable to any extent and in any direction. It is wholly a creature of usage. It is unknown to the statute law. By general connivance it might perish bodily and its powers be transferred to such members of the Privy Council as the Sovereign might from time to time think fit to

summon.

Such, then, in outline is that central part of the Constitution which comprises the relations between the Crown and the Cabinet. It represents the Constitution not as it is necessarily working at any given moment, but as it ought to work and as it will work, if all connected with it are loyal and honest. It is assumed that the various depositaries of power will respect one another and display, among other qualities, not less than an average sense of equity and of the public interests and rights. When these reasonable expectations fail, then it must be admitted that the British Constitution will be in danger.' And these reasonable expectations' may fail. That is certain. They failed in the days of Lord Bute and Lord North, and what has happened once may happen again. The Minister may consent to accept his policy from the Crown against his own judgment, prostrating himself before what, according to his creed, is its just prerogative. Such conduct may display base subserviency,' and in its effects be 'grossly disloyal,' but Ministerial human nature is capable of it, and may even associate it with notions of duty. On the other hand, the personal inclinations of the Minister, utterly divorced from all considerations of public expediency, may coincide with the personal inclinations of the Crown. In that case they will work together, much to their mutual satisfaction, but to the greater detriment of the interests of the nation. The Prime Minister may act in the Cabinet as a Grand Vizier. He ought not so to act, but he may. He may succeed in expelling from it every element of independence. By an adroit use of the fountain of honour and of the prospects of promotion, he may so manage to attach to himself the fortunes of those who remain as to lead them, answer for them, tell them just as much or as little as he chooses, and concentrate the collective authority of the Cabinet in his own person; in other words, he may be able virtually to extinguish the Cabinet and substitute a Grand Vizierate in its stead. Under the shelter of secrecy, and in the secluded councils of the Crown, he may ponder designs which it would be unsafe to avow. He may resolve to employ all the resources of his position and all the influence of the Crown to readjust the balance of the Constitution in accordance with his own theories. He may determine to set in his own person an example of self-effacement by following in all the affairs of State the course which the Duke of Wellington used to pride himself on adopting in military matters,— simply taking the orders of the Crown. He may frame his entire policy with a view to establishing and giving permanence to his

innovations. He may use or abuse for this purpose the confidence of his party, the social influence of the Crown, and those peculiar influences which literary men know how to create and how to wield, even while affecting to despise them. He may make it a part of his great aim to captivate the imagination of the people by startling exploits, to humour their prejudices and tickle their passions, and by such means seek to create a power outside of Parliament which shall dominate an existing Parliament while it lasts, and secure the return of successive Parliaments of the same sort. He may have his pupil, his protégé, the Premier in reversion, who is admitted to his confidences, saturated with his traditions, secured in the favour of the Crown, and made docile by the dream of some day playing the part of another Burleigh to another Elizabeth. In this way constitutional innovations may get a ten or twenty years' lease of life, till they come to be so firmly settled as to need a revolution for their reversal. So true is it that the harmonious working of the Constitution depends upon the good faith of those who are entrusted with its guidance, and that secret treason-not aware of its own baseness, but merely acting out an historical conscience' which is not English-may go far towards accomplishing its overthrow..

It is time to end this retrospect and to sum up in a few words the result of our observations. We saw at the outset the apprehensions awakened by the triumph of Parliamentary Reform, and the first symptoms of a reaction in favour of the older Toryism. The aim of statesmen like Sir Robert Peel was to control the House of Commons by appealing to the loyalty of the constituencies, but there were some who already divined that the evil they all dreaded might not be less easily cured by a resort to homeopathic practice, and that the 'multitude' might be more manageable than the ten-pounders. We have seen that during the first half of the present reign the Court was the seat of a Regius Professorship of Constitutional Law, devoted to the sole benefit of two illustrious pupils. The principles expounded were not of English growth. The authority of English writers was discarded, and dogmatic rules for the guidance of royalty were evolved from the consciousness of a learned German, whose chief merit through life had been that he devoted himself to the interests of his patrons. The main point he insisted on was the necessity of counteracting the democratic tendencies of the House of Commons by a more emphatic assertion of the personal prerogatives of the Crown, and by claiming for it a larger share in the work of government. As means whereby these objects were to be secured, he held that the Queen should become her own permanent Premier, take part in the initiation of legislative measures, exercise a paramount influence in the direction of foreign affairs, and seize every opportunity for coming face to face with her subjects, without the intervention of Ministers. We have seen that the historical point at which the

Baron paused in his adventurous flight was the point at which another constitutional genius, at once his contemporary and successor, began a sublimer sweep, spurning the humble landmarks of 1832, and asserting the prerogatives of the Crown as they flourished in the times of the Stuarts. It was impossible not to be struck with a certain sinister harmony in the events which made Lord Beaconsfield the First Minister of the Crown just after a zealous course of tuition in the principles of the prerogative had prepared the Crown for appreciating and welcoming his bolder doctrines. The confluence of two such streams would surely cause an overflow, under which the boundary lines of the Constitution were likely to be submerged. The beginnings of such a disaster we believe that we have witnessed and are witnessing. Prerogative has been the leading idea of Lord Beaconsfield's Administrations. He has sought out all possible occasions for prostrating himself before the ancient idol of his imagination, has burned heaps of incense at its shrine, and summoned us to join in his devotions. The gaunt outlines of Personal Rule can already be discerned through the thin veil of constitutional forms, and the reality of power is slipping from our hands. Baron Stockmar dreaded lest the changes of 1832 should lead to the establishment of a purely Ministerial Government.' The good old man must be happy now if he is permitted to see how a bolder magician wields a mightier spell, appeals over the head of Parliament to the passions of the multitude, and has so weakened the energies of ministerial government that the fate which awaits it may almost seem a matter of indifference. It is time for those of the people of England in whom reverence for the Constitution is not quite extinct, and the fires of enlightened patriotism have not yet ceased to burn, to ask themselves whereto these things will grow. Are the doctrines and the later practice of the present reign to become the ruling traditions of the next? If so, we know what we may expect. Times of trouble are in store for us, during which many things may be changed; but one thing is certain. The final upshot will not be favourable to the Throne.

HENRY DUNCKLEY.

VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION.

THIS world of ours has, on the whole, been an inclement region for the growth of natural truth; but it may be that the plant is all the hardier for the bendings and buffetings it has undergone. The torturing of a shrub, within certain limits, strengthens it. Through the struggles and passions of the brute, man reaches his estate ; through savagery and barbarism his civilisation; and through illusion and persecution his knowledge of nature, including that of his own frame. The bias towards natural truth must have been strong to have withstood and overcome the opposing forces. Feeling appeared in the world before Knowledge; and thoughts, conceptions, and creeds, founded on emotion, had, before the dawn of science, taken root in man. Such thoughts, conceptions, and creeds must have met a deep and general want; otherwise their growth could not have been so luxuriant, nor their abiding power so strong. This general need-this hunger for the ideal and wonderful-led eventually to the differentiation of a caste, whose vocation it was to cultivate the mystery of life and its surroundings, and to give shape, name, and habitation to the emotions which that mystery aroused. Even the savage lived, not by bread alone, but in a mental world peopled with forms answering to his capacities and needs. As time advanced-in other words, as the savage opened out into civilised man-these forms were purified and ennobled, until they finally emerged in the mythology and art of Greece:

Where still the magic robe of Poesy

Wound itself lovingly around the Truth.1

As poets the priesthood would have been justified, their deities, celestial and otherwise, with all their retinue and appliances, being more or less legitimate symbols and personifications of the aspects of nature and the phases of the human soul. The priests, however, or those among them who were mechanics and not poets, claimed ob

1 'Da der Dichtung zauberische Hülle

Sich noch lieblich um die Wahrheit wand.'-Schiller.