parallel.

inheritance. Nevertheless, there can of Augustus, is perhaps the nearest be no doubt that, during the period of which we speak, all the mutual This great alteration did not take relations of all the orders of the State place without strong and constant redid practically undergo an entire change. sistance on the part of the kings of the The letter of the law might be unal-house of Stuart. Till 1642, that retered; but, at the beginning of the sistance was generally of an open, seventeenth century, the power of the violent, and lawless nature. If the Crown was, in fact, decidedly pre- Commons refused supplies, the sovedominant in the State; and at the end reign levied a benevolence. If the of that century the power of Par- Commons impeached a favourite minisliament, and especially of the Lower ter, the sovereign threw the chiefs of House, had become, in fact, decidedly the Opposition into prison. Of these predominant. At the beginning of efforts to keep down the Parliament by the century, the sovereign perpetually despotic force, without the pretext of violated, with little or no opposition, law, the last, the most celebrated, and the clear privileges of Parliament. At the most wicked was the attempt to the close of the century, the Parliament seize the five members. That attempt had virtually drawn to itself just as was the signal for civil war, and was much as it chose of the prerogative of followed by eighteen years of blood the Crown. The sovereign retained and confusion. the shadow of that authority of which the Tudors had held the substance. He had a legislative veto which he never ventured to exercise, a power of appointing Ministers, whom an address of the Commons could at any moment force him to discard, a power of declaring war which, without Parliamentary support, could not be carried on for a single day. The Houses of Parliament were now not merely legislative assemblies, not merely checking assemblies; they were great Councils of State, whose voice, when loudly and firmly raised, was decisive on all questions of foreign and domestic policy. There was no part of the whole system of Government with which they had not power to interfere by advice equivalent to command; and, if they abstained from intermeddling with some departments of the executive The old struggle recommenced; but administration, they were withheld not precisely after the old fashion. The from doing so only by their own sovereign was not indeed a man whom moderation, and by the confidence any common warning would have rewhich they reposed in the Ministers of strained from the grossest violations of the Crown. There is perhaps no law. But it was no common warning other instance in history of a change that he had received. All around him so complete in the real constitution of were the recent signs of the vengeance an empire, unaccompanied by any of an oppressed nation, the fields on corresponding change in the theo- which the noblest blood of the island retical constitution. The disguised had been poured forth, the castles transformation of the Roman com- shattered by the cannon of the Parmonwealth into a despotic monar-liamentary armies, the hall where sat chy, under the long administration | the stern tribunal to whose bar had

The days of trouble passed by; the exiles returned; the throne was again set up in its high place; the peerage and the hierarchy recovered their ancient splendour. The fundamental laws which had been recited in the Petition of Right were again solemnly recognised. The theory of the English constitution was the same on the day when the hand of Charles the Second was kissed by the kneeling Houses at Whitehall as on the day when his father set up the royal standard at Nottingham. There was a short period of doting fondness, a hysterica passio of loyal repentance and love. But emotions of this sort are transitory; and the interests on which depends the progress of great societies are permanent. The transport of reconciliation was soon over; and the old struggle recommenced.

was constantly sinking, and that of the Commons constantly rising. The meetings of the Houses were more frequent than in former reigns; their interference was more harassing to the Government than in former reigns; they had begun to make peace, to make war, to pull down, if they did not set up, administrations. Already a new class of statesmen had appeared, unheard of before that time, but common ever since. Under the Tudors and the ear

been led, through lowering ranks of pikemen, the captive heir of a hundred kings, the stately pilasters before which the great execution had been so fearlessly done in the face of heaven and earth. The restored Prince, admonished by the fate of his father, never ventured to attack his Parliaments with open and arbitrary violence. It was at one time by means of the Parliament itself, at another time by means of the courts of law, that he attempted to regain for the Crown its old predominance. Helier Stuarts, it was generally by courtly began with great advantages. The arts, or by official skill and knowParliament of 1661 was called while ledge, that a politician raised himself the nation was still full of joy and to power. From the time of Charles the tenderness. The great majority of the Second down to our own days a different House of Commons were zealous royal- species of talent, parliamentary talent, ists. All the means of influence which has been the most valuable of all the the patronage of the Crown afforded qualifications of an English statesman. were used without limit. Bribery was It has stood in the place of all other reduced to a system. The King, when acquirements. It has covered ignorance, he could spare money from his pleasures weakness, rashness, the most fatal for nothing else, could spare it for pur- maladministration. A great negotiator poses of corruption. While the defence is nothing when compared with a great of the coasts was neglected, while ships debater; and a Minister who can make rotted, while arsenals lay empty, while a successful speech need trouble himself turbulent crowds of unpaid seamen little about an unsuccessful expedition. swarmed in the streets of the seaports, This is the talent which has made judges something could still be scraped toge- without law, and diplomatists without ther in the Treasury for the members French, which has sent to the Admiralty of the House of Commons. The gold men who did not know the stern of a of France was largely employed for the ship from her bowsprit, and to the India same purpose. Yet it was found, as Board men who did not know the indeed might have been foreseen, that difference between a rupee and a there is a natural limit to the effect pagoda, which made a foreign secretary which can be produced by means like of Mr. Pitt, who, as George the Second these. There is one thing which the said, had never opened Vattel, and most corrupt senates are unwilling to which was very near making a Chansell; and that is the power which makes cellor of the Exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, them worth buying. The same selfish who could not work a sum in long motives which induced them to take a division. This was the sort of talent price for a particular vote induce them which raised Clifford from obscurity to to oppose every measure of which the the head of affairs. To this talent effect would be to lower the importance, Osborne, by birth a simple country and consequently the price, of their gentleman, owed his white staff, his votes. About the income of their garter, and his dukedom. The encroachpower, so to speak, they are quite ready ment of the power of the Parliament to make bargains. But they are not on the power of the Crown resembled a easily persuaded to part with any fatality, or the operation of some great fragment of the principal. It is curious law of nature. The will of the indito observe how, during the long con- vidual on the throne, or of the inditinuance of this Parliament, the Pen-viduals in the two Houses, seemed to sionary Parliament, as it was nick- go for nothing. The King might be named by contemporaries, though every circumstance seemed to be favourable to the Crown, the power of the Crown

eager to encroach; yet something constantly drove him back. The Parliament might be loyal, even servile;

yet something constantly urged them forward.

These things were done in the green tree. What then was likely to be done in the dry? The Popish Plot and the general election came together, and found a people predisposed to the most violent excitation. The composition of the House of Commons was changed. The Legislature was filled with men who leaned to Republicanism in politics, and to Presbyterianism in religion. They no sooner met than they commenced an attack on the Government which, if successful, must have made them supreme in the State.

bottom." This is a single instance. Others might easily be given.

The bigotry, the strong passions, the haughty and disdainful temper, which made Clarendon's great abilities a source of almost unmixed evil to himself and to the public, had no place in the character of Temple. To Temple, however, as well as to Clarendon, the rapid change which was taking place in the real working of the Constitution gave great disquiet; particularly as Temple had never sat in the English Parliament, and therefore regarded it with none of the predilection which men naturally feel for a body to which they belong, and for a theatre on which their own talents have been advantageously displayed.

To wrest by force from the House of Commons its newly acquired powers was impossible; nor was Temple a man to recommend such a stroke, even if it had been possible. But was it possible that the House of Commons might be

it possible that, as a great revolution had been effected without any change in the outward form of the Government, so a great counter-revolution might be effected in the same manner? Was it possible that the Crown and the Parliament might be placed in nearly the same relative position in which they had stood in the reign of Elizabeth, and that this might be done without one sword drawn, without one execution, and with the general acquiescence of the nation ?

Where was this to end? To us who have seen the solution the question presents few difficulties. But to a statesman of the age of Charles the Second, to a statesman who wished, without depriving the Parliament of its privileges, to maintain the monarch in his old supremacy, it must have appeared very perplexing. Clarendon had, when Minister, strug-induced to let those powers drop? Was gled honestly, perhaps, but, as was his wont, obstinately, proudly, and offensively, against the growing power of the Commons. He was for allowing them their old authority, and not one atom more. He would never have claimed for the Crown a right to levy taxes from the people without the consent of Parliament. But when the Parliament, in the first Dutch war, most properly insisted on knowing how it was that the money which they had voted had produced so little effect, and began to inquire through what hands it had passed, and on what services it had been expended, Clarendon considered this as a monstrous innovation. He told the King, as he himself says, "that he could not be too indulgent in the defence of the privileges of Parliament, and that he hoped he would never violate any of them; but he desired him to be equally solicitous to prevent the excesses in Parliament, and not to suffer them to extend their jurisdiction to cases they have nothing to do with; and that to restrain them within their proper bounds and limits is as necessary as it is to preserve them from being invaded; and that this was such a new encroachment as had no

The English people-it was probably thus that Temple argued—will not bear to be governed by the unchecked power of the sovereign, nor ought they to be so governed. At present there is no check but the Parliament. The limits which separate the power of checking those who govern from the power of governing are not easily to be defined. The Parliament, therefore, supported by the nation, is rapidly drawing to itself all the powers of Government. If it were possible to frame some other check on the power of the Crown, some check which might be less galling to the Sovereign than that by which he is now constantly tormented, and yet which might appear to the people to

tuted a comparison between their united incomes and the united incomes of the members of the House of Commons. Such a parallel would have been idle in the case of a mere Cabinet. It is extremely significant in the case of a body intended to supersede the House of Commons in some very important functions.

be a tolerable security against malad-at once perfectly reasonable when we ministration, Parliaments would proba- consider the Council as a body inbly meddle less; and they would be tended to restrain the Crown as well less supported by public opinion in as to exercise the powers of the Crown, their meddling. That the King's hands to perform some of the functions may not be rudely tied by others, he of a Parliament as well as the funcmust consent to tie them lightly him- tions of a Cabinet. We see, too, why self. That the executive administra- Temple dwelt so much on the private tion may not be usurped by the check-wealth of the members, why he instiing body, something of the character of a checking body must be given to the body which conducts the executive administration. The Parliament is now arrogating to itself every day a larger share of the functions of the Privy Council. We must stop the evil by giving to the Privy Council something of the constitution of a Parliament. Let the nation see that all the King's measures are directed by a Cabinet composed of representatives of every order in the State, by a Cabinet which contains, not placemen alone, but independent and popular noblemen and gentlemen who have large estates and no salaries, and who are not likely to sacrifice the public welfare in which they have a deep stake, and the credit which they have obtained with the country, to the pleasure of a Court from which they receive nothing. When the ordinary administration is in such hands as these, the people will be quite content to see the Parliament become, what it formerly was, an extraordinary check. They will be quite willing that the House of Commons should meet only once in three years for a short session, and should take as little part in matters of state as it did a hundred years ago.

Thus we believe that Temple reasoned: for on this hypothesis his scheme is intelligible; and on any other hypothesis his scheme appears to us, as it does to Mr. Courtenay, exceedingly absurd and unmeaning. This Council was strictly what Barillon called it, an Assembly of States. There are the representatives of all the great sections of the community, of the Church, of the law, of the Peerage, of the Commons. The exclusion of one half of the counsellors from office under the Crown, an exclusion which is quite absurd when we consider the Council merely as an executive board, becomes VOL. II.

We can hardly help thinking that the notion of this Parliament on a small scale was suggested to Temple by what he had himself seen in the United Provinces. The original Assembly of the States-General consisted, as he tells us, of above eight hundred persons. But this great body was represented by a smaller Council of about thirty, which bore the name and exercised the powers of the States-General. At last the real States altogether ceased to meet; and their power, though still a part of the theory of the Constitution, became obsolete in practice. We do not, of course, imagine that Temple either expected or wished that Parliaments should be thus disused; but he did expect, we think, that something like what had happened in Holland would happen in England, and that a large portion of the functions lately assumed by Parliament would be quietly transferred to the miniature Parliament which he proposed to create.

Had this plan, with some modifications, been tried at an earlier period, in a more composed state of the public mind, and by a better sovereign, we are by no means certain that it might not have effected the purpose for which it was designed. The restraint imposed on the King by the Council of thirty, whom he had himself chosen, would have been feeble indeed when compared with the restraint imposed by Parliament. But it would have been more constant. It would have acted every year, and all the year round; D

and before the Revolution the sessions | ance and is more unmanageable than of Parliament were short and the re-established power. The House of Comcesses long. The advice of the Coun- mons gave infinitely more trouble to cil would probably have prevented any the Ministers of Charles the Second very monstrous and scandalous mea- than to any Ministers of later times; sures; and would consequently have for, in the time of Charles the Second, prevented the discontents which follow the House was checking Ministers in such measures, and the salutary laws whom it did not confide. Now that its which are the fruit of such discontents. ascendency is fully established, it either We believe, for example, that the second confides in Ministers or turns them out. Dutch war would never have been ap- This is undoubtedly a far better state of proved by such a Council as that which things than that which Temple wished Temple proposed. We are quite cer- to introduce. The modern Cabinet is tain that the shutting up of the Exche- a far better Executive Council than his. quer would never even have been men. The worst House of Commons that has tioned in such a Council. The people, sate since the Revolution was a far more pleased to think that Lord Russell, Lord efficient check on misgovernment than Cavendish, and Mr. Powle, unplaced his fifteen independent counsellors would and unpensioned, were daily represent-have been. Yet, every thing considered, ing their grievances and defending their it seems to us that his plan was the rights in the Royal presence, would not work of an observant, ingenious, and have pined quite so much for the meet- fertile mind. ing of Parliaments. The Parliament, when it met, would have found fewer and less glaring abuses to attack. There would have been less misgovernment and less reform. We should not have been cursed with the Cabal, or blessed with the Habeas Corpus Act. In the mean time the Council, considered as an executive Council, would, unless some at least of its powers had been delegated to a smaller body, have been feeble, dilatory, divided, unfit for every thing which requires secrecy and despatch, and peculiarly unfit for the administration of war.

The Revolution put an end, in a very different way, to the long contest between the King and the Parliament. From that time, the House of Commons has been predominant in the State. The Cabinet has really been, from that time, a committee nominated by the Crown out of the prevailing party in Parliament. Though the minority in the Commons are constantly proposing to condemn executive measures, or to call for papers which may enable the House to sit in judgment on such measures, these propositions are scarcely ever carried; and, if a proposition of this kind is carried against the Government, a change of Ministry almost necessarily follows. Growing and struggling power always gives more annoy

On this occasion, as on every occasion on which he came prominently forward, Temple had the rare good fortune to please the public as well as the Sovereign. The general exultation was great when it was known that the old Council, made up of the most odious tools of power, was dismissed, that small interior committees, rendered odious by the recent memory of the Cabal, were to be disused, and that the King would adopt no measure till it had been discussed and approved by a body, of which one half consisted of independent gentlemen and noblemen, and in which such persons as Russell, Cavendish, and Temple himself had seats. Town and country were in a ferment of joy. The bells were rung; bonfires were lighted; and the acclamations of England were echoed by the Dutch, who considered the influence obtained by Temple as a certain omen of good for Europe. It is, indeed, much to the honour of his sagacity that every one of his great measures should, in such times, have pleased every party which he had any interest in pleasing. This was the case with the Triple Alliance, with the treaty which concluded the second Dutch war, with the marriage of the Prince of Orange, and, finally, with the institution of this new Council.

The only people who grumbled were