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 REPLY OF "VERAX" 
 
 TO THE 
 
 Quarterly Review, 
 
 SEVEN LETTERS 
 
 REPRINTED FROM THE "MANCHESTER WEEKLY TIMES." 
 
 MANCHESTER : ALEX. IRELAND & CO., PALL MALL. 
 
 LONDON : SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO. 
 
 1878.
 
 The Crown and the Constitution. 
 
 No. I. 
 
 April 27TH, 1S78. 
 
 The first article in the Quarterly Review for April is 
 entitled " The Crown and the Constitution," and prefixed 
 to it as a double text are the titles of a volume of 531 
 pages and of a pamphlet of 50. The volume is the Third 
 Volume of the Life of the Prince Consort by Mr. Theodore 
 Martin, compiled from materials placed in his hands by the 
 Queen, and prefaced by a letter addressed to "The Queen's 
 Most Excellent Majesty;" the pamphlet, "The Crown and 
 the Cabinet," consists of five letters of mine on the volume 
 just named, which were pubHshed in these columns in 
 December and January last. That two productions so 
 utterly incommensurate in bulk and in presumable impor- 
 tance should come to be bracketed together on the front 
 page of the great ^literary organ of the Tory party is a cir- 
 cumstance which I was not at all prepared to foresee, 
 though I am heartily content to be instructed in the worth 
 of my work by the vehement zeal and the elaborate argu- 
 ments which are employed to demolish it. When I began 
 writing I never thought of challenging the verdict of so 
 wide an audience. In the discharge of a self-imposed and 
 pleasant duty I merely wrote for my accustomed readers in
 
 4 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 these northern districts. I never dreamed that the country 
 mouse would visit town. It never occurred to me that my 
 note of warning would find its loudest echo in the metro- 
 polis. How could such a thought have crossed my mind ? 
 The " Life of the Prince Consort " had passed through the 
 ordeal of London criticism, and been treated, with one or 
 two exceptions, to a shower of compliments. The accom- 
 plished politicians who preside over the daily organs of 
 opinion had received it in court attire, and written their 
 eulogies with rose water. I knew the high repute these 
 gentlemen had won as the vigilant guardians of our liberties. 
 I knew how implicitly they were trusted by the public, and 
 how well they deserved the trust ; so that if I had thought 
 about the matter I must have felt how visionary any 
 perils would be likely to appear which had managed to 
 escape their skilled and searching glance. Hence the con- 
 clusion would have seemed but too obvious that any mis- 
 givings I had felt after reading Mr. Theodore Martin's third 
 volume were nothing but the result of a needless brooding 
 over phenomena which a provincial mind was naturally 
 unfit to grasp, and that they would never have been felt at 
 all if I had happened to possess a larger knowledge of 
 affairs, such as is the professional inheritance of political 
 writers who live within three miles of Blackfriars or the 
 Strand. My letters were addressed to a familiar audience, 
 who, if not more on a level with my claims, are at least in 
 the habit of treating them with indulgence, and it was not 
 till they had heard all that I had to say, and had shown 
 that they were stirred by it, that I began to think of sub-
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 5 
 
 mitting the same thoughts to a larger public. The Reviewer 
 says I appear to "pose as a tame Junius." If I had thought 
 of posing at all it would have been as Junius rampant. As 
 a matter of posing, one would have been just as easy as the 
 other, and of the two I should have preferred the renowned 
 original. But the Reviewer does me too much honour. I 
 thought no more of Junius than of Tancred or of Mungo 
 ParL The simple fact is that, as an Englishman, my blood 
 tingled, and I wrote partly to relieve the pain. I have 
 now some reason to believe that I was right in deciding 
 to republish the letters. The response has been deep 
 and wide, and men whose judgment I willingly respect 
 assure me that some slight service has been rendered to 
 the State. The Quarterly Reviewer says that the "un- 
 founded opinions " of " Verax " " appear to be entertained 
 by certain of his countrymen," and that, too, to an extent 
 which makes it expedient for the champions of tlte Con- 
 stitution, as seen from the Tory camp, to buckle on their 
 harness. I also learn from my Reviewer that " Verax " has 
 a "following," and that in spite of his "fallacies," perhaps 
 because of them, *he is a representative man. Hence the 
 heavy-armed battery of fifty pages which has been opened 
 against " the dangerous fallacies contained in the constitu- 
 tional theories of 'Verax.'" It is, indeed, a fell and dogged 
 piece of cannonading, though the cannoneer was too much 
 flurried to be exact in his aim. The Standard imagined 
 that the aim of the article in the Quarterly was to expound 
 and defend the constitutional theories of Baron Stockmar 
 and the Prince Consort, thereupon candidly acknowledging
 
 6 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION 
 
 that it took pretty much the same view of Baron Stockmar 
 and his lucubrations as " Verax " did, and was perfectly 
 ready to hand the Baron over to anybody who chose to 
 gird at him. The Standard is quite right. Baron Stockmar 
 saw no difference between "VVhigs and Tories. He looked 
 upon them all alike as weak creatures, capable of nothing 
 better than trading in compromises. He took them all to 
 be unconscious Republicans at heart, not, perhaps, seriously 
 bent upon betraying the monarchy, but at all events prac-^ 
 tically paving the way for a Republic. The Reviewer 
 handles Baron Stockmar with due discretion. Not a word 
 is breathed against him from first to last, and he is once 
 or twice quoted with an air of benignant patronage, but 
 his constitutional theories are allowed to slumber. The 
 Reviewer, as I shall hereafter have occasion to show, goes 
 quite as far as the Baron, and even further ; but the Baron 
 is not a pleasant man to travel with. The public never 
 took to him, and even Tories eyed him askance. So he 
 is prudently kept in the background. The Reviewer, more 
 over, appears to lean upon a celebrated Semitic authority 
 on constitutional questions, and has no need of Teutonic 
 guidance. Hence when the Standard avowed its readiness 
 to make " Verax " a present of the Baron, the Reviev/er 
 wrote at once to say that the gift would do no harm to him. 
 " To a certain extent," so he writes to the Standard^ " you 
 misrepresent the object of the article in the Quarterly 
 Review on 'The Crown and the Constitution;' the object 
 of the article was to examine, not the constitutional theories 
 of Baron Stockmar and the Prince Consort, but the conten-
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 7 
 
 tion of ' Verax ' that the Sovereign could not constitutionally 
 exercise any personal influence in the direction of affairs." 
 To this explanation he is kind enough to add a brief outline 
 of the arguments in the Quarterly article, so as to make it 
 easier of comprehension to newspaper people, who are apt to 
 lose their way in intricate reasoning. I may have to avail 
 myself of this help when I come to discuss the theories of 
 the Reviewer, but there are one or two preliminary points 
 which it will be as well to dispose of first. The Reviewer 
 says : " We have been long under the impression that the 
 reign of the present Sovereign has been distinguished by 
 the smooth working of our Constitutional machinery. . 
 But for the last eighteen months we seem to have been 
 living in a quite different world. There has been solemn 
 whispering and head-shaking in certain circles whenever 
 the name of the Queen is mentioned. Respectable Liberal 
 journals, daily and weekly, have been in a flutter at the 
 aggressive attitude of the Crown." " What, then," he asks, 
 "has the Queen been doing?" and this is his answer: 
 " The head and front of her offending is that she has 
 entrusted to an accomplished man of letters the materials 
 necessary for the preparation and publication of the memoirs 
 of her husband, the late Prince Consort." This he takes to 
 be "an astonishing statement," but says it is " the simple 
 truth," which, however, it may be without being the whole 
 truth. He " reminds " us that the first volume of the 
 "Life" was published in 1875, and the second in 1876, and 
 that when they appeared they were read with eager interest, 
 not merely as containing the memoirs of the Prince Consort,
 
 8 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION, 
 
 but "as throwing a vivid light on the interior working of 
 our constitutional machinery." He tells us that " not a 
 syllable was breathed by the critics against the character of 
 the Prince Consort or the attitude of the Crown as depicted 
 in this portion of the work. But when the third volume, 
 composed evidently on the same principles as the first two, 
 appeared, there was a loud outcry." He assigns a reason 
 for the different reception accorded to the third volume. 
 It is this : " Whereas a considerable section of the public 
 were vehement advocates of Russia in her recent war 
 with Turkey, the third volume of the ' Life ' placed in 
 the clearest light and the most vivid colours the char- 
 acter of Russian diplomacy, the nature of Russian war- 
 fare, as well as the anti-Russian sympathies of English 
 statesmen and the English people throughout the events 
 which led to the invasion of the Crimea by the allied 
 armies in 1854." Hence it was thought, he adds, '* that 
 the Queen had strong personal inclinations with which 
 she wished her subjects to become acquainted, in order 
 that by the exercise of her Royal influence she might 
 convert the misguided portion of the English people to 
 better opinions. Which exercise of prerogative was, without 
 doubt, highly unconstitutional." There are some deduc- 
 tions to be made from the apparent candour and complete- 
 ness of these statements. The first volume of the " Life " 
 dealt chiefly with the Prince's early manhood, and closed 
 when the revolutionary movements of 1848 were just com- 
 mencing. The Prince was new to English ways, and, as 
 the Chancellor of the Ujiiversity of Cambridge and the
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 9 
 
 patron of Philharmonic Concerts, he ran no risk of offend- 
 ing our constitutional susceptibilities. English politics from 
 1840 to 1848 were almost exclusively of a domestic type, 
 but the Prince took a keen interest in German politics, and 
 on one occasion informed Baron Stockmar that he " had 
 worked out a plan for the regeneration of the Fatherland, 
 which he thought of communicating to the King of Prussia." 
 The Baron was alarmed, and begged him to keep back the 
 Memorandum, asking, with some pertinence, "Does your 
 Royal Highness possess the requisite knowledge for dealing 
 with the subject thoroughly and to the purpose?" Such 
 incidents were interesting and amusing. The Prince's 
 Memorandum period was only beginning, and the first ex- 
 periments were made in corpore vilu The turn of English 
 statesmen had yet to come. The English public laughed 
 a little, and that was all. The second volume 'broke up 
 different ground, and it had a different reception. Perhaps, 
 as the Reviewer says, the critics were dumb, but at all 
 events the public growled. He himself admits as much. 
 He tells us that the "solemn whispering and head-shaking" 
 began eighteen months ago — that is, fifteen months before 
 the publication of the third volume, and immediately after 
 the publication of the second. The lectures administered 
 to Lord Palmerston, the right asserted on behalf of the 
 Crown to read and revise every despatch that was sent out 
 from the Foreign Office, and, above all, the portentous 
 Memorandum of Baron Stockmar on the British Constitu- 
 tion, introduced to us by Mr. Theodore Martin in an 
 attitude of mute and spell-bound awe — these and other
 
 lO THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION 
 
 things gave a new and sinister interest to the second 
 volume. There was no loud outcry, but there was plenty 
 of "solemn whispering." The public were indeed alarmed, 
 and their alarm was heightened by the circumstances in 
 which the third volume made its appearance. It was a 
 critical moment. The feeling of a large section of the nation 
 in favour of war with Russia had been mounting higher and 
 higher throughout the year. But the nation was divided. 
 A very large, possibly the larger, section were in favour of 
 peace. Much depended upon the policy of the British 
 Government, upon its wisdom, its calmness, its sagacious 
 self-restraint. Perhaps even more depended upon the 
 moderation of Russia, and that depended upon the absence 
 of fanaticism and passion from its councils. The momen- 
 tous question for us was whether a divided nation, for the 
 sake of no imperiously pressing interests, should or should 
 not be dragged into a war which might last ten or twenty 
 years, and upset all Europe before the sword was sheathed. 
 Just then the third volume came to us fresh from the hands 
 of the Queen, for into her hands it had been delivered by 
 its accomplished author, and it was from her and not from 
 him that we received it. I need not dwell upon its contents. 
 It is enough to say that a passionate hostility to Russia 
 breathed from every page, that the policy and the diplo- 
 macy of Russia were held up in the most odious light, and 
 that the late Czar, with whose son it rested to speak the 
 decisive word for peace or war, stood forth in that volume 
 pilloried by Royal hands as a potentate lost to all faith and 
 honour. I said at the time that the third volume was " a
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION, ii 
 
 Message from the Crown sent straight to the nation over 
 the heads of Ministers, and only too well adapted to fire 
 the resentments which those who are responsible for the 
 policy of the country might wish to alla)^" To-day I repeat 
 the words. I do not say they are true, but I do say that 
 all the evidence forthcoming appears to attest their truth. 
 It had been intended to finish the " Life" in three volumes. 
 The extension of the work to four volumes was an after- 
 thought, and it was resolved upon in order that the 
 exasperating details of the war policy of 1854 might be 
 more fully given in the third volume. My Reviewer says 
 that the first volume was published in 1875, and the second 
 in 1876, as if to show that it was quite in order for the 
 third to be published in 1877 ; but it is necessary to remind 
 him that the year consists of twelve months, and that an 
 apparent interval of one year may really be an interval of 
 nearly two. In point of fact nearly two years elapsed 
 between the appearance of the first and the appearance of 
 the second volume, while there was only a year between 
 the second and third. The dates of the prefatory addresses 
 to the Queen in the several volumes show this fact very 
 clearly. The date of the first is 20th October, 1874; of 
 the second, i6th September, 1876; of the third, nth 
 October, 1877. If there had been the same interval 
 between the second and the third volume as there had 
 been between the first and the second, the third volume 
 would not have been published at a critical moment, with 
 the very probable result of exacerbating our relations with 
 Russia, of still further exciting the warlike passions of the
 
 12 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 country, and of rendering the maintenance of peace impos- 
 sible. The volume would not have been published till next 
 winter, when it might have been hoped that all danger 
 would have passed away, and the fulminating compounds 
 with which the volume was charged would have exploded 
 harmlessly. Is there not proof enough to sustain the infer- 
 ence that the volume was published when it was with a 
 purpose ? Whether there was a purpose or not, the publi- 
 cation at such a moment was indiscreet, and if there was a 
 purpose the purpose was unconstitutional. Published under 
 such circumstances the volume just reminded one of an 
 appeal to the people preparatory to a plebiscite. The 
 Quarterly Reviewer asks whether we " are to deny to the 
 chief personage of these realms that privilege of free speech 
 which she herself so liberally allows to the meanest of her 
 subjects ?" If this statement had the merit of accuracy I 
 should at once profess my infinite indebtedness to the 
 Queen; but even then I should venture to suggest that 
 indiscretion is not one of the prerogatives of the Crown, 
 and that the Queen is as much bound to prudence by the 
 high considerations inseparable from her office as "the 
 meanest of her subjects." There is such a thing as propriety 
 as well as prudence, and, constitutionalism apart, I can 
 discover no propriety in an act tending naturally and 
 obviously to excite the nation to a course of conduct which 
 her responsible Ministers might, on very wise and patriotic 
 grounds, regret and disapprove. The Queen might have 
 done much more on the constitutional theories which the 
 Reviewer propounds, but with these I must deal hereafter.
 
 No. IL 
 
 May 4TH, 187S. 
 
 Instead of disputing one by one the special objections 
 which the Quarterly Reviewer raises to the "constitutional 
 theories of * Verax,' " it will perhaps be more agreeable to 
 my readers as well as to me if we settle ourselves down for 
 a few minutes at the feet of this English Gamaliel, and 
 endeavour to grasp the full meaning of his remarkable 
 utterances. To me, I confess, they have a special attrac- 
 tion. For one thing they confirm my suspicions. In 
 reading the " Life of the Prince Consort " there appeared 
 to me to be traces everywhere of a desire to familiarise us 
 with the principles and the practice of personal rule in 
 matters of government, and t^) win from us a quiot assent 
 to certain important innovations. The conclusion seemed 
 to be thrust upon us by way of experiment, just to see how 
 it would fall in with our ideas, that the English people had 
 hitherto been living in a state of delusion respecting the 
 functions of the Crown; that the constitutional notions 
 into which we had been born and bred were becoming 
 obsolete; that the reverence we had been accustomed to 
 feel for the High Court of Parliament, and especially for the 
 House of Commons as the collective representation of the 
 whole realm save the Queen and the Peers, was a grovelling 
 superstition ; and that to conceive of the Cabinet as of a 
 body of administrators nominated by Parliament, upon
 
 14 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 whose advice the Crown was bound to act, and upon whose 
 shoulders the entire responsibility rested for everything done 
 whether in home or in foreign affairs, was mere illusion. 
 After going through the third volume of the "Life," I had the 
 impression left upon me that somehow or other the bark of 
 the State was being carried by new currents into unknown 
 latitudes, and that if the hints with which the book was 
 strewn, and the theories which were wafted under our eyes 
 with such an afflatus of Royal approbation, ever came to be 
 embodied in our political life, the future history of this 
 country would be something very different from what it had 
 been for the last hundred and fifty years. I do not know 
 who the Quarterly Reviewer is ; like me, he is anonymous ; 
 but he speaks as one having authority. He seems to have 
 a special, mission to instruct us and exhort us and recover 
 us from the error of our ways. Whether he speaks with the 
 sanction of the Crown, or has only stolen the mantle of the 
 Crown's chief Minister, it is at least certain that the literary 
 authority of Toryism is at his back, and that he is enun- 
 ciating principles which those whom he serves will do their 
 best to carry out. To my great surprise, then, I find him 
 endorsing the inferences which I had distrustfully drawn. 
 I learn from him that my suspicions are all well founded, 
 and that instead of being indulged in as suspicions they 
 ought to be accepted as plain truths, and recognised as the 
 guiding stars of the Constitution. He tells us that in the 
 nature of things government reposes partly upon force and 
 partly upon opinion. Force rests with the father who wields 
 the rod, and constrains his children to obey him. As the
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 15 
 
 children grow up they are likely to have their own ideas 
 respecting the expediency or the justice of frequent whip- 
 ping, and may even come to doubt whether they ought to 
 be whipped at all. These notions of theirs are the opinion 
 which seasons force. Opinion in relation to force naturally 
 varies a good deal. At one time it may be in favour of 
 abject submission, and at another of wild rebellion ; but 
 that government is the best where they are blended with a 
 due admixture ; where the Sovereign, who, as the Reviewer 
 tells us, is the " Father of his people," compels or chastises 
 with discretion, and the people, who are his " children," 
 show their good sense by being docile to his authority. 
 This is the basis of the Reviewer's constitutional fabric, and 
 it is duly fortified by a quotation from Aristotle, as well as 
 by sundry awful examples of the evils which happen when 
 the father, who wields the rod, and the children, who have 
 now and then to smart under it, cannot agree as tg their 
 respective shares in this disciplinary procedure. The Re- 
 viewer traces the fluctuations of force and opinion in the 
 history of the Constitution from the earliest times, and I 
 may have occasion hereafter to take exception to some 
 peculiarities of the process, but for the present it is neces- 
 sary to follow the main thread of his speculations. In the 
 days of the Stuarts the rod was used too freely. Those 
 eminent fathers of their people, Charles I., Charles II., and 
 James II., instead of giving prudent heed to the voice of 
 opinion, did whatever they Hsted, trusting too much to the 
 force they wielded as one of their paternal prerogatives. 
 But throughout the drama one redeeming circumstance is
 
 l6 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 to be observed. The Sovereign and the people stood, as 
 they had ever done, face to face. No interloping body of 
 statesmen came between them to moderate the demands of 
 the people and to hold in check the pretensions of the Crown. 
 This evil came in later. At that time regal force and popular 
 opinion fought the battle out, but agreement was found to 
 be impossible, and, as the people were stronger than the 
 King, the King had to go. This was the Revolution of 1688, 
 an epoch to be remembered, since the Reviewer dates from 
 it the commencement of constitutional decay. The Crown 
 was then stripped of the pretensions to personal rule which 
 had led to the mighty quarrel, and tethered fast down to law. 
 The " vast if undefined prerogative " of the Crown, which 
 had been the root of all the mischief, disappeared when 
 William and Mary gave their sanction to the Bill of Rights, 
 and the succession to the Crown was fixed in the Electress 
 Sophia and her descendants by the Act of Settlement. But 
 then, according to our Reviewer, a huge and unprecedented 
 evil stole in. Partly owing to the new maxims established 
 by the Revolution, and partly owing to the fact that the 
 first and second Georges could not speak English, the tasks 
 and the responsibilities of government passed from the 
 Crown into the hands of party, and as the Revolution had 
 been brought about mainly by the Whigs, the party which 
 ruled was the Whig party. The innovation lasted without 
 interruption from 1688 till 1832. George III. strove to 
 emancipate himself from the tyranny of his ministers, and 
 in some measure succeeded, but he was foiled at last, and 
 gave up the effort in despair. To be sure, the Tories came
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 1 7 
 
 into power with William Pitt in 1783, and had a monopoly 
 of office till 1830, but the damning vice of government 
 by party flourished all the same. For a great part of this 
 long period, says the Reviewer, the Crown was in com- 
 mission, and throughout the whole of it the Sovereign and 
 the people were kept asunder by interloping parties, who 
 governed in the King's name, and whose right to do so was 
 based upon the idea, derived originally from the Whigs, 
 that it was their duty to defend the people against the 
 prerogatives of the Crown. Political demoralisation was 
 complete. The ancient Constitution of England was over- 
 turned. The people at length actually acquired, so we are 
 told, the habit of transferring to their party leaders the 
 sentiment of loyalty which was due to the Crown. Happil) 
 it all came to an end, or ought to have come to an end, in 
 1832. The people then declared that they could look after 
 their own interests, and the necessity of government by 
 party existed no more. The Whigs expired utterly, so says 
 the Reviewer. Their raison d''etre was gone. The case was 
 not so bad with the Tories. True, they could no longer 
 pretend to thrust themselves in between the Crown and 
 the people, but they were always the defenders of the 
 Crown, and in the new circumstances their old function 
 revived. The special characteristic of the Tories is said to 
 be this : *' So long as the right and honour of the Crown 
 remain intact" they "have not the least desire to restrict 
 the hberties of the people," from which it follows that if the 
 Crown, in the assertion of what is deemed to be its " right 
 and honour," ever comes into conflict with the liberties of 
 
 B
 
 1 8 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 the people, it is the liberties of the people that must go. 
 Hence the Tories were well fitted to play an important part 
 in the new state of things which began in 1832. That a 
 new state of things did then begin is of course only the 
 theory of the Reviewer, which I am doing my best to 
 expound ; but, without stopping to dispute his accuracy by 
 an appeal to facts which will occur to everybody, let us see 
 what the new state of things is according to his conception 
 of it. In the first place, then, the whole of the period 
 falling between the Revolution of 1688 and the Reform 
 Bill of 1832 disappears from the face of our constitutional 
 history. The mode of governing by means of party and 
 party Administrations, in other words, by means of respon- 
 sible ministers commanding a majority in the House of 
 Commons, was an unhealthy, irregular, and, judged of by 
 the older practice, an unconstitutional mode of govern- 
 ment. It is now at an end, or coming to an end. The 
 Crown and the people now revert to their old relations, such 
 as they were before the Revolution stripped the Crown of 
 its prerogatives. Force and opinion, the rod which coerces 
 and the children who are to be disciplined and coerced, 
 once more stand face to face, with no overshadowing and 
 moderating presence between them. The Queen now 
 appeal =; to her people, and the people speak back respect- 
 fully to the Queen, recognising her motherly affection, 
 deferring to her riper knowledge, and dutifully anticipating 
 her wishes. The doctrine which now rules is that the 
 interests of the Crown and the interests of the people 
 are identical. The Queen holds this doctrine, as I am
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 19 
 
 sure she does, but so also, we are told, does every 
 member of the Royal Family. All of them, the Reviewer 
 assures us, have " shown us how clearly they understand 
 that the interests of the Crown and the nation are identical." 
 From this doctrine an important practical inference follows. 
 If the interests of two parties are identical, either of the two 
 will promote the interests of the other by promoting his own. 
 Hence, if the Crown looks well after its own interests, it is 
 at the same time advancing the interests of the nation. 
 This is an easy Vade mecum for our future kings. They 
 need not think of the welfare of the nation ; they need only 
 think of themselves, since this is the same thing as thinking 
 of *the nation. The Reviewer might, perhaps, say that what 
 he means is that the interests of the Crown, well under- 
 stood, are identical with the interests of the people, well 
 understood ; but this he does not say, and could not say 
 without childishness, for it would be to assert a mere tTuism, 
 and to throw open the whole question as to what makes for 
 the interest of the several parties, and as to who is to be the 
 judge in matters necessarily and co-extensively common to 
 both. This last point he assumes to be settled in favour of 
 the Crown. He maintains in so many words that the Crown 
 is the best judge of what is best both for itself and for the 
 nation, and that alike in home and foreign affairs. So the 
 constitutional pass to which he conducts us is just this. 
 Constitutionalism, as understood and practised for one 
 hundred and fifty years by statesmen like Walpole, Chat- 
 ham, Pitt, Fox, Shelburne, Canning, Wellington, Peel, Grey, 
 Russell, Lansdowne, and Palmerston, is at an end. We go
 
 20 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 back for precedents to the times prior to the Revolution of 
 1688, which upset everything. The Sovereign and the 
 people, force and opinion, are once more face to face, and 
 are to rule the realm by their happy agreement. Cabinet 
 Ministers are now strictly and literally the servants of the 
 Crown, and may be expected to be at all times willing to 
 adopt as their own the suggestions made to them by the 
 Crown. Parliament will of course assemble as heretofore, 
 but it will give up the initiation of measures and not venture 
 to interfere with foreign policy. As regards imperial politics, 
 it will confine itself to certain vague functions which the 
 Reviewer sums up in the word "control." This will give it 
 more time to attend to Railway Bills and other such matters, 
 and it will probably be able to take more frequent and 
 longer holidays. My readers may ask what would happen 
 if Parliament turned rusty, and whether a debate and a 
 division might not upset this pretty constitutional apple- 
 cart. It is my privilege in reply to point out, always 
 according to my Reviewer, that on the principles which are 
 to preside over the new era this catastrophe could hardly 
 happen. Government, we have already been told, rests 
 partly on force and partly upon opinion, the force being 
 the Sovereign's and the opinion the people's, and these two 
 factors are henceforth to co-operate harmoniously. This 
 harmony is easily to be secured. The rule is obvious. 
 The Sovereign already wields the force of the government ; 
 let the Sovereign also dictate to the people their opinions, 
 or rather let them reverently look to him for guidance. In 
 this way they will never ^be at variance, force and opinion
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION 21 
 
 will always agree, and Parliament, which might else prove 
 restive, will merely be the instrument of supplying in the 
 people's name " the spirit and energy that support the head 
 which thinks and the arm which strikes," that " head " and 
 that " arm " being of course the Monarch. The Reviewer 
 tells us that " the Crown is the centre to which all sound 
 opinion, independently of party, should gravitate," and " in 
 the opportunities of collecting, centralising, and directing 
 opinion it is plain that no influence can compare with that 
 of the Monarch." The Reviewer anticipates a natural 
 objection and gives his answer. I quote both. "If it 
 be said that such a constitutional balance would be dan- 
 gerous to freedom, we answer that, even if it were, it is the 
 natural consequence of self-government under the English 
 Constitution, and, therefore, a contingency which freedom 
 must be prepared to face." He thinks, however, that the 
 danger is imaginary, because the Crown has now no solid 
 support except in opinion, and, of course, if all opinion 
 gravitated to the Crown, and the nation took all its 
 opinions from the Crown, there would be no danger at all. 
 " Finally," says the Reviewer, " if a monarch should ever 
 be blind enough to mistake his interests" — as monarchs 
 sometimes are — " and bold enough to encroach on his sub- 
 jects' liberties by force " — as a monarch in whom all force 
 is centered, and to whom all opinion gravitates, might, 
 perhaps, be tempted to do — then, says the Reviewer, we 
 should at least be able to fight. I hope we should ; but 
 the despotism he advocates often steals like a deadly 
 soporific over the souls of its victims, and kills the virtues
 
 22 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 which might else arrest its final triumph. It is safer far to 
 hold freedom fast while we have it than to relax our grasp 
 and suffer it to slip away, or to hold it so loosely and love 
 it so lightly that we hardly know whether we have it or not, 
 and all on the mere chance that, after wilfully losing it, we 
 should be wiUing and able to wrest it back. I doubt both 
 the willingness and the ability, except after centuries of 
 bondage and at the cost of bloody revolutions. History 
 warns us that freedom slighted is freedom lost. Our 
 Reviewer asks us to surrender it, or, rather, he asks us to 
 believe that it is already surrendered. His theory is a 
 scandalous fiction ; but were it true, or had those in whose 
 behalf he propounds it the power to make it true, we 
 should have to say, as some one said when James I. was 
 beginning to babble his Divine Right notions in the un- 
 accustomed ears of the nation : "If the practice should 
 follow the positions, Vv^e are not likely to leave to our suc- 
 cessors that freedom we received from our forefathers."
 
 No. III. 
 
 May iiTH, 187S. 
 
 The announcement made in almost official tones by the 
 Quarterly Reviewer, that it behoves us henceforth to look 
 upon the period between 1688 and 1832 as a dropped 
 chapter of our Constitutional history, is of such a startling 
 and amazing description that it almost takes away one's 
 breath. I have read something like it in Lord Bea- 
 consfield's earlier novels, but that circumstance rather 
 heightens than diminishes one's surprise at meeting with 
 it so many years later in an article obviously not meant 
 to pass for fiction, and within the covers of a perio 
 dical which may pretend at least to the sobriety of age. 
 But there is no fact so strange that it has not an expla- 
 nation at its elbow. Literature easily acquires a Servile 
 taint, and when unscrupulous innovators make good 
 their footing on the heights of power it is seldom long 
 before an applauding chorus is heard from the sycophants 
 below. Our Constitutional history is determined not by 
 what is written, but by what is done. A thing once done 
 is for the time victorious, and all that is venal, or thought- 
 less, or courtly in the land prepares to follow in its train. 
 Should it prove to be true that we are on the eve of a 
 larger assertion of monarchical pretensions, we may be 
 quite sure that eloquent writers will be ready to prove 
 that what we regard as innovations are but a wise 
 adaptation of ancient maxims to the altered conditions of
 
 24 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 the realm. Any doubts that may arise will be referred 
 for solution to the legal advisers of the Crown, and the 
 conscience of the Executive will never want the liniment 
 of plausible precedents, expanded and applied with ripe 
 sagacity. Should some rash Hampden appeal to the Civil 
 Courts he may perhaps find that the principles of jurispru- 
 dence are not unchanging, and that legal lore can still 
 furbish up a few weapons in defence of accomplished facts. 
 We are surprised at being told that the Constitutional 
 history of the hundred and fifty years ending with 1832 is 
 an unnatural episode which cannot be too soon forgotten ; 
 but this only shows what novices we are, and how simple 
 we have grown through the conviction which has been bred 
 in us that our liberties are unassailable. If the experiment 
 now being made upon us succeeds, we may outlive our 
 simplicity and have to moralise over greater things. Never- 
 theless, the assertion we are asked to accept is an astounding 
 one. Let us see what it means. " It is commonly supposed," 
 to adopt a phrase which makes my Reviewer angry, but 
 with which I do not care to dispense, that the period of our 
 Constitutional history which began with the Revolution of 
 1688 has been the most glorious in our annals. We refer 
 to that date our deliverance from a system of government 
 which was incompatible with the liberties of the people, 
 with the rights of ParUament, with the independence of the 
 judicature, and with the dignity of the realm. It was, 
 indeed, a signal deliverance, and the memory of it has been 
 embalmed in the gratitude of all succeeding generations. 
 The evils from which >we then escaped had their root
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 25 
 
 in personal rule. The Kings of the Stuart dynasty- 
 could not get rid of the notion that they inherited 
 " a vast if undefined prerogative " which placed them 
 above the reach of legitimate control, and entitled them to do 
 exactly as they pleased. They thought that their power on 
 earth resembled the power of God in Heaven, and was so 
 absolute in its nature that it even set them free from the 
 common rules of morality. They held by this notion with 
 the obstinacy of infatuation. One of them had been sent 
 to the block, but the 'fiction which cost him his life revived 
 in the breasts of his sons, and in the reaction which followed 
 the extinction of the Commonwealth they almost succeeded 
 in making it prevail. If they had succeeded, England would 
 have sunk into the condition of France or Spain; but 
 happily they failed. The Revolution established the supre- 
 macy of law ; but it did more than this ; it established the 
 supremacy of Parliament. It was seen to be henceforth 
 not so much an axiom as a fact that the will of the people 
 as expressed through their representatives in the House of 
 Commons must be the governing power of the realm. 
 There is but one way in which the will of the people can 
 become the supreme factor in government without imposing 
 too heavy a yoke upon the personal opinions of the Sovereign, 
 and that is by lodging the actual business of government m 
 the hands of Ministers, who can be changed from time to 
 time as often as their policy fails to command the confi. 
 dence of the nation. The Sovereign cannot be got rid of, 
 and yet the Sovereign cannot be asked to undertake the 
 practical management of measures of which it is not to be
 
 26 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION 
 
 supposed that he can always approve. Even if we could 
 trust him to act in good faith against his own convictions, 
 it would not be decent to exact the sacrifice. Hence, 
 from the moment when we resolved that we would govern 
 ourselves, and not permit any one man, however exalted, 
 to govern us as he liked, the transference to Ministers 
 of the work of governing became an absolute necessity. 
 Nor was it so great an innovation as it seemed j it was 
 only the systematising of ancient practice. Distinguished 
 writers of all countries have exhausted their eloquence 
 in eulogising this arrangement. They have seen in it 
 the highest proof of our political sagacity. The essence 
 of Constitutional government has been held to reside 
 in this, and in this alone. It appeared to be precisely 
 what the age required. Europe had descended from feudal 
 times crowned or burdened with many dynasties. The 
 people, in their ripening political capacity and their growing 
 love of freedom, wanted to be entirely free, and 5^et did not 
 v,-ant to part with their Kings. How should the problem 
 be solved ? England had shown the way. Eet your Kings 
 accept as their Ministers the statesmen whom you know 
 and trust, and whom, on the strength of this knowledge 
 and trust, you designate for the service of the Crown. In 
 this way you may retain your Monarchy and yet govern 
 yourselves, reconcihng by this device the associations of the 
 past with the demands of a new age. One of the reasons 
 why we in England are attached to Constitutional govern 
 ment is that it enables us to wed the Monarchy with poll- 
 tical progress, and to combine with full preparedness for all
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 27 
 
 the exigencies of the national career the luxury and the satis- 
 faction of having at the head of the State a descendant of 
 our ancient Kings. I have said that this method of govern- 
 ment is not a novelty. The greatest authorities are with me 
 in asserting that the principles which triumphed at the 
 Revolution, and are in force to-day, are but a revival of 
 those which were recognised in early times and were 
 feeling their way to supremacy under the later Plantagenets, 
 though they entered upon a long eclipse at the downfall 
 of the House of Lancaster. Judged by the result of an 
 experiment extending through 190 years, they have worked 
 well for us, and not ill for the Crown. For that period, 
 at all events, we have dethroned no kings. To find 
 out what they have done for the nation we need only look 
 around ; or if a political proof is wanted, we may compare 
 the Treaty of Dover with the Treaties of Fontainebleau 
 and Vienna. Such is the period we are summone*d to 
 repudiate. Such are the principles which we are invited to 
 regard as obsolete. And we are to go back to what ? to 
 when ? To a system of personal rule, to times of anarchy 
 and of infamy. The Reviewer is pleased to pay me a 
 compliment. I said in one of my letters that " to provide 
 against the chance that hereditary descent may occasionally 
 give us a fool for a sovereign, our forefathers devised the 
 mechanism of responsible government," and he says, " We 
 can hardly give *Verax' credit for being so simple as he 
 wishes to appear, and we believe he knows very well that 
 the principle of Ministerial responsibility, so far from being 
 invented to remedy any weakness inherent in the hereditary
 
 28 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 principle, was, in effect, a doctrine founded on the con- 
 sideration — to use Aristotle's words — 'that the power of the 
 King must be inferior to the power of the whole community,' 
 and that, like every other Constitutional principle since the 
 Restoration, it flowed from particular circumstances, and is 
 sustained by special precedents. The Constitution is older 
 than Ministerial responsibility." I make the Heviewer a 
 present of the word "devised," and am not sure that I 
 understand his exposition of Aristotle's doctrine; but on 
 the question at issue I must persist in being as simple as I 
 seem to be. I really hold that the principle of Ministerial 
 responsibility owes its origin to the necessity of providing 
 for the "weakness inherent in the hereditary principle." 
 One would say beforehand that it must be so. It is not 
 possible to imagine an intelligent nation undertaking to 
 allow itself to be governed by the heir whom geniture 
 chances may equip for the task, except on the under- 
 standing that the business of government shall be done 
 for him by capable persons enjoying its confidence. The 
 opposite course is neither natural nor possible, except at 
 the cost of frequent depositions and at the risk of civil 
 wars — that is, except by applying the principle of responsi- 
 bility in the roughest and most direct manner to the Sovereign 
 himself It has sometimes been said that the President of 
 the United States has more power intrusted to him than 
 an English Monarch. The statement is true, and there is 
 good reason for the difference. An American President is 
 elected once in four years by universal suffrage. He is 
 usually a man in the pi;ime of life, who has been conversant
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 29 
 
 with politics from his earUest years. Even if the nation as a 
 whole does not know him, he has been long and widely 
 known by competent judges. He has probably spent some 
 years in the House of Representatives or in the Senate, or 
 perhaps has been a leading figure in the local Legislature, 
 and a Governor of the State. Hence he has proved himself 
 to be a man to whom power may be safely intrusted, and 
 who is likely to use it well. How different is such a man 
 from the babe, or the stripling, or the adult heir who may 
 stand next in the lijie of succession to an hereditary 
 Crown. Sentiment forbids our setting him aside, and, 
 thanks to Constitutional government, it is no longer neces- 
 sary; but no one will contend that a nation such as we 
 have become shall deliver itself up blindfold to a ruler 
 whose political capacities have no better attestation than 
 that he is descended from his parents. The " hereditary 
 principle" was not in former times the constitutional 
 principle of the English monarchy. The succession was 
 usually confined to the same family, but not necessarily to 
 the nearest heir. Incapable claimants were set aside, and 
 when the Crown was once conferred possession counted the 
 proverbial nine points at law. But in proportion as the 
 hereditary principle established itself the principle of 
 Ministerial responsibility came in as a counterpoise. I 
 seize the opportunity of returning the compliment of my 
 Reviewer. I can " hardly give " him " credit for being so 
 simple as he wishes to appear " when he gravely assumes 
 that Ministerial responsibility is of later date than the 
 Restoration. He says, as if he were uttering some
 
 30 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION 
 
 unquestionable dogma of politics, "the Constitution is older 
 than Ministerial responsibility." I, on the other hand, 
 maintain that Ministerial responsibiUty is as old as Parlia- 
 ment. As this is not the place for a dissertation on a 
 matter of detail, I must be content to quote an unchallenge- 
 able authority. I refer the Reviewer to section 286 of 
 Mr. Stubbs's great work on Constitutional History. He 
 will find the subject of the section described in the 
 margin: "Responsibilities of Ministers insisted on." And 
 what is the period to which the section refers ? Well, it 
 includes the reign of Henry HI., or let us say, 600 
 years ago. I quote just one sentence : " The scheme of 
 limiting the irresponsible power of the King by the 
 election of the great officers of the State in Parliament 
 has been already referred to as one of the results 
 of the long minority of Henry III,," in other words 
 of the "inherent weakness of the hereditary principle." 
 But the Provisions of Oxford were adopted long after the 
 King had ceased to be a minor, and by those celebrated 
 acts of State, among other things, twelve Commissioners 
 of Parliament were appointed to manage the Government. 
 So with the Lords Ordainers in the reign of Edward 
 n., and the Continual Council in the reign of Richard 
 H. These were not the King's Ministers, but Ministers 
 appointed by Parliament to take out of the hands of the 
 King's Ministers the work they had done badly. As for 
 the King's Ministers they were repeatedly got rid of by 
 hanging, or beheading, or exile, because, though they had 
 obeyed the King, they had abused his power and mis-
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 31 
 
 governed the people, and because constitutional practice 
 was not yet sufficiently mature to allow of their being got 
 rid of by a vote of censure or by impeachment. And yet 
 we are invited to assume that Ministerial responsibility is a 
 modern innovation subsequent to the Restoration. The 
 Reviewer invites the Crown to resume its former strength, 
 mentioning as an allurement that *' strong monarchs have 
 always been popular in England." " The reigns," he adds, 
 "to which the imagination most fondly reverts are those 
 of the First and Third Edward, Henry V., and Elizabeth," 
 but he says nothing about the tragical character of the reigns 
 which followed, though it is surely no trivial matter that the 
 immediate successors of the three first-mentioned monarchs 
 were all deposed and murdered. The power of the great 
 Elizabeth passed into the hands of a weak and foolish man, 
 who held, and no doubt sincerely believed, that to question 
 what a King might do and set limitations to his personafrule 
 was akin to atheism and blasphemy. He narrowly escaped 
 his fate ; but his son inherited and fulfilled it. These ex- 
 amples are not of my choosing. They have been selected by 
 a loyal Reviewer for the encouragement of his Sovereign. 
 But I owe to him the opportunity of enforcing by a fourfold 
 lesson the moral on which I wish to insist. The infelicity of 
 personal rule is that it can be bequeathed to a successor onl)^ 
 in its weakness and not in its strength. Strong government 
 is possible still, but possible with safety only when the nation 
 governs ; and the examples unwarily cited by the Reviewer 
 suffice to show how thoughtless is the loyalty which would urge 
 the Crown to attempt to be strong on any other conditions.
 
 No IV. 
 
 May i8th, 1878. 
 
 *' It is commonly supposed " — so I said in one of my 
 former letters — "that while the Queen reigns, and all the 
 acts of the Government are done in her name, the respon- 
 sible business of government, as regards both foreign and 
 domestic affairs, is done by the dozen or fifteen statesmen 
 whom the Queen selects as her Ministers from out of the 
 ranks of the party which commands a majority in the House 
 of Commons." The Quarterly Reviewer is very angry with 
 this assertion. He does not attempt to reply to it, nor 
 does he say that it is not true, but he flouts and kicks it 
 like a man in a passion. The supposition itself he ascribes 
 to "ignorance;" for "ignorance," he says, "of the grossest 
 kind it is to suppose that the occupant of the oldest throne 
 in Europe, surrounded by a boundless prestige, possessed 
 of a vast if undefined prerogative, and commanding bound- 
 less sources of influence, could ever sink into the capacity 
 of a mere mechanical register of the will of Parliament." 
 Now, whether the supposition itself, as put by me, and not 
 his travesty of it, is true or false, the Reviewer will hardly 
 deny that it is widely prevalent, and this is the pith of my 
 assertion. Nobody imagines that the Queen does the actual 
 work of government, or that she dictates to her Ministers 
 the policy they shall adopt either in home or in foreign 
 affairs. It is a universal belief that she keeps herself aloof
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION 33 
 
 from the wranglings of politics, and that, though Govern- 
 ment after Government may be swept away, the mortification 
 of defeat and the stigma of popular disapproval can never 
 touch the Throne. The Tii7ies is a competent witness to 
 English opinion, and I find it within the last few days 
 referring to " the Constitutional theory that the King reigns, 
 but does not govern." The Reviewer ascribes this phrase 
 to " the French doctrinaires," and says that the matter of 
 my pamphlet might be readily compressed into it. Perhaps 
 it might ; at all events, I should be content with the epigram, 
 which, moreover, has a more definite parentage than " the 
 French doctrinaires" in general. It was coined by M. 
 Thiers as a terse description of Constitutionalism, and it 
 does not seem to have been accepted by his rival " doctrin- 
 aire," M. Guizot. This distinguished statesman was the 
 doctrinaire of another doctrine, which did not work well. He 
 allowed his master to have a large share in governing, and 
 the result was that both master and servant came to grief in 
 February, 1848, when the French nation called them to 
 account. M. Thiers's doctrine might have saved the 
 Throne, but at all events Louis Philippe's practice ruined 
 it. So much for the truth of my assertion as to what the 
 relation between the Crown and the functions of govern- 
 ment is " commonly supposed " to be. But the Reviewer 
 says that the supposition itself is based on ignorance, not 
 ignorance as to actual facts, but ignorance as to what an 
 occupant of the English Throne "could ever" become. 
 My readers will perhaps see that in the use of words he is 
 not so accurate as one could wish. Things that are or 
 c
 
 34 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 have been one can know or be ignorant of, but metaphysical 
 possibilities are properly matters of opinion. If I do not 
 agree with the Reviewer as to what an English sovereign 
 "could ever" become, the difference must be set down, 
 not to ignorance on his part or on mine, but to an inability 
 to take the same view of the same facts ; and in that case 
 the question whether he is right or whether I am right must 
 be settled, not by mystical rhodomontade, but by sober 
 argument. As to matters of fact it happens that the 
 Reviewer and I are not very widely apart. In my letters 
 on " The Crown and the Cabinet " I gave some reasons for 
 believing that the authority of the Crown had unduly in- 
 vaded the precincts of the Cabinet, and that in the highest 
 quarters doctrines were held which, if carried out in practice, 
 would seriously conflict with the responsibility of Ministers 
 and with the supremacy of Parliament. The Reviewer 
 seems to admit that what I dreaded has already happened, 
 and he goes so far as to assert that it " could never " be 
 otherwise. With great unwillingness I accept his assertions 
 on the question of fact. We know very little respecting the 
 personal action of the Crown. Between it and us the 
 Cabinet interposes an impenetrable veil. But the Reviewer 
 is perhaps better informed. He may know those who know 
 everything, and thus have a right to be accepted as a 
 messenger from the unseen world. The only knowledge to 
 which I can pretend is derived from the communications 
 which were made to us in the " Life of the Prince Consort" 
 on the authority of the Queen. When the veil was 
 graciously lifted up a little way, apparently for the purpose
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 35 
 
 of tempting a reverent curiosity, and familiarising us with a 
 Court view of Constitutional principles, I ventured to accept 
 the invitation, and turn the rare opportunity to account. The 
 inferences I was forced to draw startled me. I might have 
 hesitated to publish them, since this would be impossible with- 
 out speaking more freely of the Queen than EngHshmen arc 
 in the habit of doing ; but scruples of this sort vanished 
 when I found that the Queen regarded them with disfavour, 
 and that the custom of suppressing all reference to her in 
 political controversy, instead of being looked upon as a 
 tribute to loyalty, was resented as a device of the Whigs 
 for weakening the Monarchy. Having no desire to incur 
 resentment on this score I spoke out freely, but with due 
 diffidence, not wholly crediting what I seemed to see, and 
 heartily wishing to be set right if my observations had 
 deceived me. In this dilemma I am found by my Reviewer, 
 who rushes m, flushed and flaming, as if from the innermost 
 shrine, shouting to me that it is all true, and that I am a 
 fool for fancying it could be otherwise. Only bethink you, 
 he cries, of the antiquity of the Throne, of its boundless 
 prestige, of its vast, if undefined, prerogative, of its count- 
 less sources of influence, and then say whether it is possible 
 for anything short of the grossest ignorance to imagine that 
 the occupant of such a throne " could ever " sink into the 
 capacity of a mere mechanical register of the will of Parlia- 
 ment. An objurgation of this sort, screeched from the lips 
 of a literary apparition, is only too well adapted to flurry a 
 simple citizen like me ; but I must do my best to keep 
 cool, and to return to my assailant such answers as I can.
 
 36 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 I am confronted, then, with four reasons in favour ot 
 absolutism ; four reasons all tending to prove, and amount- 
 ing jointly to unanswerable proof, that the occupant of the 
 Throne of England — that is, at the present time. Queen 
 Victoria — never could and never can acquiesce as a matter 
 of course in the will of Parliament. His first reason is the 
 antiquity of the Throne ; it is the oldest Throne in Europe. 
 The fact itself is hardly worth disputing, but there are 
 one or two modifying considerations which ought to be 
 borne in mind for the sake of accuracy. If the Throne of 
 England is unquestionably the oldest now, it is because 
 there has been a great mortality among its possible com- 
 petitors. Its nearest rival, the Throne of France, has 
 vanished for the present, apparently not to be revived again. 
 The Throne of the Holy Roman Empire went to pieces in 
 1806. Its fragments were flung to Napoleon and his dogs 
 of war. The Papal Throne has lost its Temporal Power, 
 and is once more what it was in earlier days, the Chair of 
 St. Peter. The extinction within the present century of 
 three of the oldest thrones in Europe might suggest an 
 inquiry into the causes of the relative longevity of political 
 institutions, and the results of such an inquiry could 
 hardly fail to be of service to the next oldest Throne 
 upon the list. But the antiquity of a throne is no 
 reason why its occupant should have absolute power; 
 it is rather a reason to the contrary. Its very oldness 
 suggests the likelihood that it has not, as a matter 
 of fact, possessed that power, for if it had it would have 
 succumbed to the fate, which has overtaken all other
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 37 
 
 Thrones that have pretended to it, and the lesson of ex 
 perience is that it never can advance the same pretensions 
 without tasting the same fate. The Throne in 1689 was 
 older than it was in 1489, but it had immeasurably less 
 power, and only saved itself from extinction by acknow- 
 ledging the supremacy of Parliament. The "boundless 
 prestige" of the Throne, referred to by the Reviewer as 
 furnishing another reason in favour of absolutism, is, like 
 all mere attributes, imponderable ; and I know not in what 
 it consists unless it be in the freedom, the greatness, and 
 the glory of the nation to which the Throne belongs. It is 
 our energy, our industry, our genius, our arms, our blood 
 that has built up the renown of the English Monarchy and 
 made it the most famous in the world, and these are not 
 things to be turned into the price of political servitude. 
 There are also the sentiments of respect and honour and 
 veneration which spring up as if by instinct in English 
 breasts for the person of the Sovereign; but they are the 
 fruits of loyalty, they would wither if the roots of loyalty 
 were to decay, and decay would set in soon enough if the 
 Sovereign ceased to respect the rights of the people, or 
 could be suspected of a desire to thwart the will of Parlia- 
 ment. One has a difficulty in comprehending how this 
 could be done, but the difficulty does not seem to occur to 
 the Quarterly Reviewer. He assumes, not only that it is 
 done, but that it cannot but be done, by virtue of 
 the regal advantages we are considering. He show.'? 
 great courage in reminding us in this connection of the 
 " countless sources of influence " which are at the disposal
 
 38 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION 
 
 of the Throne, since it cannot but occur to us that it is 
 by the use of this influence that the apparent miracle of 
 setting aside the will of Parliament is to be performed, if 
 performed at all. Now we all know that the will of Par- 
 liament, when it has once been pronounced, cannot easily 
 be set aside. When embodied in a Bill which has passed 
 the two Houses, the Royal assent must follow as a matter 
 of course. On matters of public policy, which are not 
 dealt with by bills, if the House of Commons signified its 
 will by a Resolution or an Address to the Crown, the 
 course recommended must be adopted or there would be a 
 great scandal. It may be taken as an axiom that the will of 
 Parliament, when once it has been deliberately pronounced, 
 must give law to the Crown as well as to the realm. Yet 
 the Reviewer scouts the idea that the occupant of the 
 oldest Throne in Europe can ever sink into the capacity of 
 a mere mechanical register of the will of Parliament. The 
 metaphor is introduced apparently to confuse the issue, 
 which, indeed, he might well be frightened at having 
 raised ; but if he means anything it must be this — viz., that 
 the Sovereign is able to evade compliance with the national 
 will as expressed through Parliament. The Reviewer puts 
 us in a dilemma, and we are compelled to feel our way out 
 of it as best we can. We know full well that the will of 
 Parliament, when it has been formally pronounced, cannot 
 be evaded, and yet we are told that it is evaded. How 
 can that be? It is not, perhaps, altogether a matter of 
 chance that the Reviewer brings together in this connec- 
 tion two such words as " influence " and " will." The
 
 THE CROWN 'AND THE CONSTITUTION. 39 
 
 "will" of Parliament is made up of the wills of the majority 
 of its members, and "will" is the field of "influence." 
 A given state of the will, as metaphysicians call it, is the 
 result of given motives presented to the mind, and its 
 contents would have been different if the motives had been 
 different. Hence, though the will of Parliament cannot be 
 evaded, it can be controlled. Instead of leaving it to shape 
 itself, it is possible to help in the shaping of it; and the 
 person who is able to do this, though obliged to acquiesce 
 in the decision when it has once been pronounced, is no 
 " mere mechanical register" of the decision, but its origin- 
 ator. This, according to our loyal Reviewer, is what the 
 Crown is doing, and, if done, it can be done only in two 
 ways : either by appealing to the people, and so helping 
 to form the opinion which Parliament represents, or by 
 influencing those who wield the opinion of Parliament. 
 Our constitutional arrangements lend themselves "most 
 readily to this latter method. To secure the host, it is 
 enough to secure the leaders. The will of Parliament is 
 the will of the party majority, and so long as the party 
 submits to be led by its chiefs the power that controls 
 them controls Parliament. We are thus led back once 
 more into that mysterious region where the pasture lands 
 of the Cabinet break away into the highlands of the Crown, 
 and where " countless sources of influence" give forth their 
 fertilising streams. In this happy region open the golden 
 gates which give access to the upper grades of our social 
 hierarchy, where the glorified Commoner assumes the 
 coronet and begins his heavenward ascent. Here are the
 
 40 
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 prizes of parliamentary struggles and magnanimous self- 
 surrenders, and here, perhaps, sometimes, among nobler 
 aspirants, the subservient Minister grasps his high reward, 
 and settles down among the Peers of England, whose 
 historical renown becomes the price for which a nation is 
 mystified and its confidence betrayed.
 
 No- V, 
 
 May 2STH, 1878. 
 
 In my last letter I referred to some of the reasons which, 
 in the opinion of the Quarterly Reviewer, make it utterly 
 absurd to suppose that an English Sovereign " could ever" 
 submit as a matter of course to the will of Parliament. 
 The reasons I then touched upon were the antiquity of the 
 Throne, its boundless prestige, and the "countless sources 
 of influence " which are at its disposal. But the Reviewer 
 mentioned a fourth reason, viz., the possession by the 
 Sovereign of " a vast, if undefined, prerogative," and this 
 appeared to be so important that I decided to reserve it 
 for a separate discussion. In his letter to the Spectator of 
 May 4th, he dwells afresh upon " the actual existence oT the 
 Royal prerogative." " Whether you and ' Verax ' like it or 
 not," he says to the editor of that journal, " you are con- 
 fronted with the fact of a Royal person in possession of 
 very extensive powers;" and a little further on he speaks of 
 "the Royal person aforesaid" as "possessed of a vast legal 
 prerogative." He seems, indeed, to recognise but two 
 factors in the Constitution of to-day — Royal Prerogative 
 and Public Opinion ; and he says that the great question 
 to be settled is " how these two distinct but not necessarily 
 antagonistic forces are to be reconciled with each other." 
 To his apprehension Parliament does not figure separately 
 in the problem. Parliament is not so much an institution
 
 42 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION 
 
 as a branch of public opinion, and public opinion is the 
 real rival of Royal prerogative. But having brought these 
 two powers face to face with each other, he proceeds to 
 knock one of them to pieces. One half of his article in 
 the Quarterly is devoted to an attempt to prove that public 
 opinion is but a poor judge of domestic questions, being 
 oftener wrong than right, and that in foreign questions it is 
 utterly incompetent. He assures us, almost in so many 
 words, that public opinion is generally a dolt or a fool, and 
 if so the conclusion is plain. Once admit that the welfare 
 of any concern depends exclusively upon the intelligence 
 of two persons, one of whom is a fool, and it follows that 
 the concern will fare badly unless the person who has some 
 intelligence is allowed to do as he Hkes. This being the 
 Reviewer's conception of the relation in which the Royal 
 prerogative and pubhc opinion stand to each other, it is 
 clearly his view that the welfare of the nation depends 
 upon the unfettered exercise of the prerogative. Public 
 opinion, so he says, though it is the informing spirit of 
 Parhament, is seldom to be trusted. Our one true 
 and safe guide through the thorny labyrinths of public 
 affairs is that Royal person who is likelier than any or 
 than all of us to know what is best ; whose judgment 
 no passion ever clouds ; and whose prerogative, equal 
 as a separate force to the rival force which resides 
 in the nation, has over it the enormous advantage of 
 being always intelligent and always wise. This is the 
 Reviewer's estimate of our position, but knowing, as we 
 do, to what baleful ends some of our kings have used their
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 43 
 
 prerogative, we may be pardoned if we cannot persuade 
 ourselves to trust it any more than he trusts pubh'c opinion ; 
 and so, putting his pessimist views and ours together, it 
 may well be a matter of wonder how the nation has 
 managed to survive so long. My explanation of the matter 
 is that we have kept prerogative well at bay. Our fore- 
 fathers seized it and bound it, as the Angel in the 
 Apocalypse did with Satan, that it might harm us no 
 more. The nation has prospered in proportion as it has 
 been allowed to govern itself Often well-nigh ruined by 
 prerogative, it has as often raised itself from the dust by its 
 own energies, and, after giving a final throw two hundred 
 years ago to the oppressive power of its monarchs, it 
 entered upon a perpetually extending domain of freedom 
 and prosperity. But what is the Royal prerogative *? Let 
 us approach it with due respect, but not with unsandalled 
 feet, and ask with fearless curiosity wherein it consists,*and 
 what is the nature and what the basis of the rights which 
 are so mysteriously asserted over us on its behalf. Oui 
 Reviewer gives us no help in this inquiry. He says that 
 prerogative is " vast " and " undefined ;" and vast anything 
 must be which has no definition, and so can have no finis 
 put to it. I do not want to weary my readers with a dry 
 disquisition, but I must run the risk, in order to convey 
 to them some notion of what prerogative is understood to 
 be, and of the way in which it has grown up. The thing 
 itself, as the Reviewer truly says, is "undefined;" never- 
 theless some attempts have been made to define it. Sir 
 Henry Finch, writing in the palmy days of Charles I., says
 
 44 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 it is " that law in case of the King which is law in no case 
 of the subject." Blackstone obliges us with a description 
 instead of a definition. *' By the word prerogative," he 
 says, "we usually understand that special pre-eminence 
 which the King hath over and above all other persons, and 
 out of the ordinary course of the common law, in right of 
 his regal dignity. It signifies in its etymology (from proe. 
 and rogd) something that is required before or in pre- 
 ference to all others ; and hence it follows that it must be 
 in its nature something singular and eccentrical." This 
 luminous explanation does not entirely disperse the gloom 
 which surrounds the subject, but if we carry with us the 
 idea that the prerogative is " something singular and 
 eccentrical," it will be no bad guide. For a definition 
 grounded upon facts we must come to Hallam, who tells 
 us that "prerogative in its old sense might be defined as 
 an advantage obtained by the Crown over the subjects, in 
 cases where their interests came into competition, by reason 
 of its greater strength." This hits the mark. We must 
 conceive of two powers confronting one another — a King 
 who wants to have as much of his own way as he can get, 
 and a people conscious of their rights and anxious to assert 
 them. The King is one, the people are many. His coun- 
 sels are united, theirs divided. He has " countless sources 
 of influence " at his disposal, big slices of folkland to give 
 away and earldoms to bestow, and so can induce others to 
 make common cause with him and fight for him, whereas 
 they for the most part are poor and helpless. Perhaps no 
 open struggle ensues. ^ In ordinary times the conditions of
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 45 
 
 the case would hardly admit of one. But from year to 
 year, and from century to century, successive kings watch 
 their opportunities and make the most of them, and all the 
 power they can wrest to themselves out of the helplessness 
 of their subjects, all the advantage they can win by fraud 
 or extort by force, they appropriate as theirs for ever, and 
 style it their "prerogative." In the course of time, by an 
 irony which becomes the strong, they pretend that their 
 prerogatives were given to them for the good of their 
 subjects. " I must confess," says Hallam, " that no part 
 of this assertion corresponds with my view of the matter. 
 It neither appears to me that these prerogatives were ever 
 given, nor that they necessarily redound to the subjects' 
 good." No; they were never given. They were seized upon 
 and held by the right of the strongest. It is one of the most 
 curious things in the world to observe how these stolen 
 rights — for such they were originally — became gradually 
 transformed into sacred prerogatives, and gathered upon 
 them the dews of heaven. As one element in the process 
 must be reckoned the influence of the Church. It would 
 be a mistake to suppose that the Church in the Middle 
 x-Vges favoured the absolute power of kings. The Church 
 had pretensions of its own which brooked no secular 
 rival, but one thing at least it did for kings — it conferred 
 upon them the sanctions of religion. Anointing oil was 
 first used at the coronations of the Eastern Emperors 
 at Constantinople, and it soon made the tour of the 
 West. "When the bishop poured the sacred oil upon 
 the monarch's head, people bethought themselves of the
 
 46 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 prophet Samuel, who in this way singled out David as the 
 chosen of the Lord, and anointed him to be King over 
 Israel. Henceforth the new King was the Lord's Anointed, 
 upon whom it was impious to lay hands, and whose autho- 
 rity — all that he had yet gotten to himself, and all that he 
 still hoped to get — could be held out as in some sense the 
 gift of Him by whom kings reign and princes decree justice. 
 Next to the Church, as the instruments by which regal 
 rights were transformed from robbery to prerogative, must 
 be placed the lawyers, most of whom were clergymen 
 employed in civil functions. In the thirteenth and four- 
 teenth centuries there was a great revival in the study of 
 Roman law, founded on the Institutes of Justinian. As 
 the grandest and most symmetrical system of jurisprudence 
 ever created, it naturally took possession of the legal intel- 
 lect of Europe ; and, though it was never formally brought 
 into use in this country, there can be no doubt that its 
 maxims very largely influenced the reasonings of English 
 lawyers. It soon became the object of law writers to 
 systematise the English law after the fashion of the Roman 
 law, to trace it down to first principles, and give to every 
 part of it, as far as possible, a raison d'etre in the nature of 
 things. They did this for the regal power, taking as their 
 guide the Imperialism of the Roman law, and a very fine 
 theory they turned out. I take it that most of these law 
 writers were skilled in the scholastic logic of the day, and 
 that they did for monarchical doctrines pretty much what 
 their compeers in another line of thought did for theology. 
 At all events, the distinctions which were drawn between
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION, 47 
 
 the personal and the pohtical capacity of the King, and 
 the definitions given of the various ways in which one 
 of these capacities affected the other, involved a tissue 
 of metaphysical refinements that would have done credit to 
 Anselm or Aquinas. By the end of the Middle Ages the 
 metamorphosis was complete, and the prerogatives of the 
 Crown figured in the redoubtable and sacred character 
 which they have worn for some eyes ever since. By that 
 time it could be gravely asserted that, while all men were 
 subject to the King, the King was subject to none but 
 God; that everything a subject possessed belonged by right 
 to the King, to whom it pertained to take just so much as 
 he wanted, and of his grace and favour to leave the rest ; 
 that Parliaments owed all their privileges to the King's 
 goodness, and that when he pleased he could resume them ; 
 that the judges were only his delegates, and that, as a prin- 
 cipal can always take the place of his agents, so the .^ing 
 can, if he pleases, take the place of his judges, and give 
 such decisions as he sees fit ; that as all laws are made 
 by his delegated authority, he can suspend laws, or issue 
 proclamations which will serve as well as laws ; that all 
 power proceeds from the King ; that he can do no wrong ; 
 that he cannot even imagine wrong ; that he is personally 
 present in all his courts of justice; that he is never a minor; 
 that he never dies, together with a host of similar fictions 
 and extravagances. Be it well understood that no statute 
 ever sanctioned these conceits, and that they are unknowi 
 to the ancient Common Law of England. They owe theii 
 origin to the systematising ingenuity of the writers of law
 
 48 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION 
 
 books, though kings and sycophant ministers gladly laid 
 hold of them for their own pm-poses. Some of these high- 
 flown fictions have been turned by forensic and political 
 alchemy to honest uses. If the King cannot imagine what 
 is wrong, it is certain that he cannot intend what is wrong, 
 and an upright judge could, therefore, reverse in the King's 
 name a wrongful decision pronounced by the King himself, 
 or under his directions. In the same way, if the King can 
 do no wrong, it is obvious that his public acts must be done 
 for him by persons who can raise no such presumption in 
 their favour — a necessity which leads straight to responsible 
 government. But though these fictions have been rendered, 
 harmless, they show what a dangerous proneness there once 
 was to an idealisation of the person of the Sovereign, and 
 how narrowly we escaped that Oriental submissiveness 
 which first deified and then destroyed the Monarchy of 
 France. It is much to be wished that the friends of pre- 
 rogative at the present day would tell us more about it than 
 they do. On this high theme we ought not to be left 
 to gather our information from reverential glances and 
 mysterious allusions. , If the Crown has any rights which 
 can be exercised in opposition to the will of Parliament, I 
 should like to see them scheduled ; or if the Crown has 
 any rights which cannot be exercis"ed now, but are to be 
 considered as latent and held in suspense, ready to be 
 asserted as soon as the authority of Parliament can be 
 successfully evaded, in that case also it is very desirable 
 that a list of them should be made out by some competent 
 hand. If the struggles of the seventeenth century are to be
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 49 
 
 renewed, it is high time to survey the battle field and 
 prepare for the onset. Watchfulness is the more necessary 
 because the Constitution is not Hkely to be openly assailed. 
 Should an inroad be attempted, it will probably start from 
 some familiar maxim, and the innovation will wholly 
 consist in giving to the maxim in question a narrower 
 or a wider meaning than is consistent with its spirit, 
 or than those who framed it would have sanctioned 
 if they could have foreseen the altered circumstances 
 of to-day. Within the past week we have had examples 
 in both directions. Two hundred years ago it was 
 laid down that a standing army was not to be maintained 
 in this country in time of peace without the consent of 
 Parliament, and that the Crown ought to have the absolute 
 disposal of the military forces of the Crown. If we are to 
 accept the contention of the Attorney-General, the first of 
 these maxims is to be narrowed so as to apply only to* the 
 United Kingdom, while the second is to be extended so 
 as to include the military forces of India. The India Act 
 of 1858, as it passed the House of Commons, contained 
 a clause which would have prevented the Crown from 
 employing the Indian Army out of India without the 
 consent of Parliament ; but it was alleged that this clause 
 limited the prerogative of the Crown, and a new clause 
 was introduced which shifted the incidence of the pro- 
 hibition from the use of Indian troops to the use of the 
 funds of the Indian Treasury for supporting them. We 
 have probably not heard the full history of this substituted 
 clause. On the plea of saving the prerogative of the
 
 50 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 Crown as regards the disposal of its military forces, the 
 clause gave to the prerogative a wide and dangerous 
 extension, as we are now finding out, and may find out 
 more fully some years hence, when Europe has fully 
 mastered the portentous fact that the shores of the 
 Mediterranean may be menaced any moment by a Sepoy 
 army. The tenor of the substituted clause was well re- 
 membered by those who sent the secret orders to India six 
 weeks ago. As regards the older prerogative, there is no 
 mystery about it. History shows us a time when it did 
 not exist at all, and it also tells us, if not how it grew, at 
 all events that it did grow, bit by bit, till at length the 
 elected chief of a band of pirate emigrants was changed 
 into a Heaven-anointed King, great in the privileges 
 allowed to reside in him, but greater far in the fund of 
 latent claims which lay behind the throne, and which he 
 sought to enforce as often as he found opportunity. What 
 we have to remember is that the principles of English 
 liberty are older than the prerogative. They existed before 
 the prerogative — in the dimensions it ultimately assumed — 
 was ever dreamed of, and the history of their development, 
 from the period, not of their birth, but of their resuscitation, 
 in the days of Magna Charta, down to the Revolution of 
 1688, was the history of an incessant and ultimately victo- 
 rious struggle against the pretensions of the Crown. The 
 prerogative, " vast if undefined," which the Quarterly 
 Reviewer brings out of the seclusion of two centuries and 
 expects us to worship, we know only as the persistent 
 enemy of freedom, and an attempt to restore its ascendency
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 51 
 
 would be fitly met by recurring to the glorious examples of 
 our ancestors. Save that fragment of it which is embodied 
 in Parliamentary Statutes, or survives in continuous usage, 
 and is practically identical with the discretion reposed by 
 Parliament in the responsible Ministers of the Crown, 
 prerogative is dead. The Bill of Rights and the Act of 
 Settlement, the title-deeds of the reigning dynasty, are 
 monuments built upon the grave of prerogative, and any 
 Minister who sought to revive it would deserve to be reputed 
 a traitor alike to Queen and People.
 
 No VI 
 
 June ist, 1878. 
 
 In the course of these letters I have often had to refer 
 incidentally to the doctrine held forth by the Quarterly 
 Reviewer respecting the functions of the Crown in the 
 management of foreign affairs, and before bringing them to 
 a close it may be as well to dwell a little more fully upon a 
 question which has lately excited so much concern. In my 
 remarks on Mr. Martin's "Life of the Prince Consort" I 
 ventured to assume that foreign affairs are as truly the 
 affairs of the nation as home affairs, and that the nation is 
 as much entitled to decide upon the line of conduct to be 
 pursued towards other nations as it is to make its own laws 
 or to settle the principles of its internal administration. In 
 the opinion of the Reviewer the nation ought to confine its 
 attention to domestic affairs, and leave foreign affairs exclu- 
 sively in the hands of the Sovereign. ParHament is invited 
 to remember that it is only a part of the Great Council of 
 the Realm, and that in regard to foreign questions its proper 
 province is control. To frame a right course of action in 
 foreign affairs is said to require qualifications which Parlia- 
 ment does not possess. For one thing it is destitute of the 
 requisite knowledge. Average Englishmen, we are told, 
 know but little of the geography, the history, or the resources 
 of foreign States, and the odds are that the men they choose 
 for their representatives do not know much more. Parlia-
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION, 53 
 
 ment does not number Emperors and Kings among its 
 personal acquaintances ; it has no experience in the mys- 
 teries of diplomacy, and no means of forming alliances. 
 Foreign potentates know nothing of Parliament except as 
 one of the domestic institutions of the realm. " Our 
 constitutional arrangements are nothing to them." They 
 recognise the Queen as the " visible representative of the 
 national majesty." They deal with her as if she were as 
 absolute as themselves, and hold her responsible for the 
 nation. Unless we abandon all transactions with these 
 august personages, we must, therefore, so it is said, con- 
 form ourselves to their ideas of government, and give to the 
 Queen that absolute power without which she cannot act 
 with firmness, nor assure herself of being able to carry 
 out a consistent policy. Parliament, moreover, so we are 
 confidently assured, has not the means of giving effect to 
 its decisions on foreign affairs, were it rash enough to Torm 
 any. It rests with the judgment of the Queen to decide 
 upon peace and war, and the movements of the military 
 forces of the country depend upon her will. Mere English- 
 men have only to think of the security of their country, but 
 the Queen has also to think of her own honour, and this 
 gives her a double interest. Hence, says the Reviewer, 
 her interest in foreign questions is " beyond comparison 
 greater than that of any other single Englishman, and may 
 even be compared to that of the nation itself." Hence 
 the Queen is at once " the head and the arm of the Con- 
 stitution," the intellect that guides and the sword that 
 defends the realm. It follows that there is but one rule for
 
 54 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 Englishmen in reference to foreign questions. They are 
 asked neither to think nor to decide. This is not their 
 business. All they have to do is to give " generous and 
 ungrudging support to the Sovereign power," understanding 
 by "Sovereign power," not Parliament, in which, according 
 to the great expounders of the Constitution, Sovereignty 
 alone resides, but the person of the reigning monarch. 
 The Reviewer says that " when the Romans had acquired 
 empire, and found that their old constitutional machinery 
 was inadequate to the administration of their affairs, they 
 deliberately chose to retain empire at the cost of liberty." 
 He hints that this choice will not be ours, but that we shall 
 show that we know "how to maintain both liberty 
 and empire, by placing full confidence in the Sovereign." 
 But this seems to be precisely what the Romans did. 
 Instead of asserting the authority of the Senate in the 
 management of affairs which embraced the whole of the 
 civilised world, they " placed full confidence " in their 
 Imperator, and lost their Hberty. It is odd that we are 
 recommended to take the same course to preserve ours, and 
 I for one should like some better guarantee for the success 
 of the experiment. But if Parliament were ever so well 
 qualified to meddle with foreign affairs, the Reviewer 
 assures us that there would be a fatal objection to its doing 
 so in its want of adequate leisure. We are told that it 
 " groans under the weight of the duties with which it has 
 charged itself since it abandoned its old functions of control 
 to take the initiative in legislation," and that "it becomes 
 every year more incapable of accomplishing the task which
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 55 
 
 its ambition has undertaken." At every turn in the dis- 
 cussion the Reviewer treats us to a fresh surprise. " The 
 initiative in legislation " is, it seems, a function which does 
 not properly belong to Parliament, and the magnitude of 
 its legislative work is only an instance of its "ambition." 
 Under the new state of things for which it is the mission 
 of the Reviewer to prepare the way, we may infer that the 
 sole right of introducing bills will be transferred to the 
 Crown, and that most of the business which now occupies 
 the time of the Legislature will be discharged by one of 
 Her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State, with no other 
 help than a body of clerks and the seal of the Department. 
 But, as things are now, even the omnivorous activity of 
 Parliament cannot dispose of all the work that has to be 
 done. The " architecture of the State " needs to be made 
 "worthy of the State's imperial character," our rivers want 
 purging ** of the acids by which they are poisoned,"* and 
 the features of a once beautiful country preserved " from 
 the plague of smoke by which they are disfigured." Hence, 
 even if Parliament could pretend to rival the sagacity of 
 the Crown, it would still be necessary to institute a division 
 of labour; and, that being the case, what arrangement could 
 be better than that Parliament should give the whole of its 
 time and attention to domestic legislation, and leave the 
 domain of foreign affairs in the hands of the Sovereign % The 
 business of the nation would then be properly conducted ; the 
 representatives of the people would look after dirty rivers 
 and smoky chimneys, and the Crown would settle whether 
 there should be peace or war. In speaking of the Crown
 
 56 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 we usually understand by it the Crown in its political and 
 impersonal capacity, but the Reviewer means by it the 
 personal rights of the Sovereign. He demands for the 
 Queen a " large personal share in the control of our foreign 
 policy," and declares that it belongs to her, not only " by 
 virtue of her prerogative," but "by the nature of things." 
 What is demanded for the Queen is demanded, of course, 
 for her successors. The Reviewer marks with a sic my 
 reference to "hereditary brains," but the phrase is suffi- 
 ciently accurate to point a pertinent question. Granting 
 that we may safely entrust the foreign policy of England, 
 with all the momentous issues that depend upon it, to the 
 " personal control " of the Queen, what guarantee can we 
 possibly possess that the calm intelligence, the freedom 
 from prejudice, and the capacity for patriotic self-detach- 
 ment for which she is distinguished, will be possessed in 
 an equal degree by those who come after her % For the 
 competence of a Cabinet we have some approach to a 
 guarantee in the voice of the nation and the votes of 
 Parliament ; but what guarantee can we ever have for the 
 competence of successive wearers of the Crown? If a 
 Cabinet blunders it can be dismissed, but if a Sovereign 
 blunders the Constitution affords us no remedy. The 
 inference suggested by common sense is that the Sovereign 
 cannot be intended to occupy a position in which blunder- 
 ing is possible, whereas our Reviewer would have us adore 
 her blunders, and still go on reposing in her the blind trust 
 which appears to be demanded " by the nature of things." 
 It is now time to bestow a glance upon some of the larger
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION, 57 
 
 reasons which the Reviewer advances in support of his 
 doctrine, and the first is that the doctrine itself is a faithful 
 record of our immemorial practice. Foreign affairs, he says, 
 were always regarded as the private domain of the Crown, 
 and in this fact we have the origin of our political liberties. 
 This part of his argument is a curious tissue of misstate- 
 ments and fallacies, and I must do my best to disentangle 
 it. We are told that at an early period in the history of 
 the nation the monarch and the people were united in a 
 common bond of selfrdefence " by the attitude which the 
 Crown assumed in its foreign relations in consequence of 
 the insular position of the kingdom." " The Enghsh 
 people," we are further informed, "have always instinc- 
 tively understood that the maintenance of their domestic 
 hberties depends on the independence of their country, 
 and they have naturally looked for the preservation of this 
 independence to their Sovereign as the depository of "the 
 concentrated force of the nation." It does not need much 
 instinct for a nation to know that if they are to retain their 
 freedom they must not allow another nation to become 
 their masters \ but it is puzzling to make out how " the 
 insular position of the kingdom " made it specially difficult 
 for the Enghsh people to maintain their independence. 
 That circumstance, one would say, should have made the 
 task easier. Then, as to our pohtical liberties. They were 
 won, says the Reviewer, from our monarchs by a process of 
 bargaining. As often as the monarch wanted to go to war, 
 his people refused to supply him with the means of warfare 
 unless he made them some concession. Thus we have the
 
 58 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 highly singular spectacle of a people who " instinctively 
 understood" that their independence could only be pre- 
 served by the warlike attitude of the Crown, but who yet, 
 whenever the monarch wanted to fight for them, instead of 
 applauding his resolution as a proof of patriotism, and 
 flocking gratefully to his standard, coolly seized the oppor- 
 tunity for striking a bargain. Our forefathers were shrewd 
 men, to say the least ; and the " bond of union " between 
 them and their monarchs was so lax that it permitted the 
 two parties to aim at different ends, and to higgle with one 
 another on the way to the battle field. These statements 
 are incongruous because they miss the truth. The Reviewer 
 may not wish to mislead, but he has to make out a case, 
 and such a purpose is not favourable to accurate history. 
 The truth is that our insular position was always favourable 
 to national independence. If the English Channel had 
 been dry land we should have been swallowed up in the 
 empire of Charles the Great, and become, a few centuries 
 later, one of the fiefs of the French monarchy. But the 
 ocean served us as a rampart against the invader. Our 
 national independence was secure in its sea-girt home. 
 Our kings went to war, not to maintain our independence, 
 but to prolong their own sway over their continental 
 dominions, or to reconquer them after they had been lost, 
 and so far from securing our national independence by these 
 exploits they did all that lay in their power to endanger it. 
 These continental complications lasted from the Norman 
 Conquest to the loss of Calais, a period of nearly 500 
 years. Englishmen were then pretty much what English-
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 59 
 
 men are now, fond of glory and fond of fighting. Still, 
 
 as the cause was their monarch's more than it was theirs, 
 
 they made him pay for their assistance, and the cost of 
 
 war became the purchase money of freedom. The people 
 
 never did make, and never would have made, a battle 
 
 for independence the subject of a bargain. As events 
 
 turned out, the military exigencies of the monarch were 
 
 favourable to self-government, but it is a fiction to 
 
 suppose that national independence was the prize of 
 
 warfare. The French people could have told a different 
 
 tale when their lands were wasted with fire and sword by 
 
 English invaders, and an English King was crowned in 
 
 Paris. But our forefathers were wiser than their children. 
 
 They made the warlike projects of the Sovereign the means 
 
 of extending their liberties, whereas we make them the 
 
 occasion of surrendering ours. Another reason why we are 
 
 said to be bound to leave the direction of foreign affairs in (I 
 
 the hands of the Crown is that " force is supreme " in 
 
 foreign affairs, and the military force of the nation is at the 
 
 sole disposal of the Crown. Here is another riddle, but it 
 
 is one which is hardly worth solving. Force is no more * 
 
 supreme in foreign than in domestic affairs. In one sense 
 
 it is the backbone of all government. It is kept in reserve 
 
 to enforce the will of the community when it is resisted, |, 
 
 and is as really present in the arrest of a pickpocket as in 
 
 the preparations for a campaign. As for the assertion that 
 
 the military force of the nation is at the sole disposal of the 
 
 Crown, it is playing with words. The military force of the 
 
 nation belongs to the nation, which cannot be deprived of
 
 6o THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 it even for six weeks, except by fraud. The most important 
 point that can arise in foreign affairs is to determine when 
 moral effort shall give way to the use of force, and to say, 
 as the Reviewer does, that this is to be settled mainly by 
 the personal judgment and will of the Sovereign is to claim 
 for the crown a perilous prerogative — a prerogative so 
 perilous that the Crown could hardly be expected to 
 survive its frequent use. This is what I meant by saying 
 in one of my former letters that "the Crown we only 
 know as the ceremonial device of the Great Seal by which 
 the nation's resolves are attested, and the moment we 
 are forced to know it in any other capacity, danger 
 commences for one party, though hardly for both." 
 The " party " for whom danger would commence is, of 
 course, the Crown, for it is absurd to suppose that the 
 nation would long permit the Crown to play the autocrat 
 with its lives and fortunes, and as the nation is immea- 
 surably the stronger of the two it would certainly issue 
 victoriously out of a struggle for existence. The Reviewer 
 gives one reason more in support of his doctrine. The 
 policy of England, he says, is one of non-intervention, but 
 while the principles of that policy are clear enough they 
 are difficult to apply. We have to steer our way "between 
 the Scylla of Absolutism and the Charybdis of Anarchy," 
 and we can only hope to do so with safety " by leaving to 
 the Executive — we will go. further," says the Reviewer, 
 "and add the Sovereign herself — ^just liberty in the conduct 
 of foreign affairs," The main difficulty lies in knowing 
 when to intervene, and the nation is said to be disqualified
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 6 1 
 
 for deciding on this point because of its popular sympa 
 thies. If it had its way. Absolutism would stand no chance. 
 If an oppressed race rose in arms against its tormentors, 
 Enghshmen everywhere would throw up their caps, and 
 demand that the influence of this country should be exerted 
 in favour of the insurgents. " French revolutionists, Spanish 
 juntas, Italian republicans, Hungarian rebels, Polish patriots," 
 Englishmen have applauded them all by turns. In the same 
 mad way they have lately gone in for Servians, Bosnians, 
 Herzegovinians, Bulgarians, and Greeks in their struggle 
 with the Turk. For the last eighty years Enghshmen have 
 been always sinning, and in their intemperate zeal for "civil 
 and religious liberty all the world over," there is no telling 
 what freak they may not commit. Hence they are utterly 
 unfit for taking any part in the guidance of foreign affairs. 
 The Crown is free from these weaknesses. It is severely 
 impartial, and knows how to hold the balance even be!ween 
 rulers who presume too much upon their power, and sub- 
 jects who are seized with too keen an enthusiasm for 
 freedom. The people are prejudiced. Possibly they would 
 have spurned alliance with the Emperor Napoleon so soon 
 after the horrors which Victor Hugo has lately painted, and 
 in that case there would have been no Crimean War. But 
 see how nicely the Queen managed him ; how adroitly she 
 and the Prince twisted him round their fingers, and what 
 glorious results followed at Balaclava and Sebastopol. It 
 has been regarded by some persons as an open question 
 whether they twisted the Emperor round their fingers or 
 the Emperor twisted them round his, but loyalty admits of
 
 ()2 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 but one reply. However that may be, it is certain that the 
 same "just Hberty in the conduct of foreign affairs" which 
 got us into one war would probably get us into another 
 war of an equally glorious description, if the nation would 
 only stand aside and trust the safety and honour of the 
 State to the unadvised and irresponsible sagacity of the 
 Crown. This is what we are asked to do, but, notwith- 
 standing the blandishments of the Quarterly Reviewer, I. 
 fancy the reply of the nation will be, '•' Not yet."
 
 No. VII. 
 
 June 8th, 1878. 
 
 It is time to end this discussion, the length of which may 
 have unduly taxed the patience of my readers, but as this 
 is my last letter I venture to hope that they will extend 
 their goodness to my closing observations. My reply would 
 have been much shorter if I had simply confined myself to 
 rebutting the Reviewer's arguments. Nothing would have 
 been easier than to "crumple him up," as the saying is. 
 But apart from the distaste I have for mere logical contro- 
 versy, grounded to a large extent upon a conviction of its 
 uselessness except as pastime, I was anxious to listen to 
 him, and to induce my readers to listen to him, so that we 
 might together grasp the full import of what he was trying 
 to say. For this purpose I have sought to give to his 
 statements of fact and doctrine a completeness whicif they 
 certainly did not possess as they left his pen ; to lay hold 
 of the principles he flourished for our acceptance, and to 
 show them up as the malefactors and impostors they truly 
 are. And this task I have undertaken as a mere matter 
 of duty — a duty which has accidentally lighted upon my 
 shoulders, but which is common to all Englishmen who 
 have a head to think and a heart to feel, who know enough 
 of the history of their country to cherish a patriotic pride in 
 its chequered but glorious fortunes, and who scorn the notion 
 of surrendering their blood-bought liberties into the hands 
 of sophists and charlatans. So, as one of them, I render 
 this poor but loving piece of service to the Commonwealth.
 
 64 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 and, having done it, shall mix again with the citizen crowd 
 among whom my sympathies and aspirations lie, and whose 
 honest and uncorrupted thoughts I have striven to express. 
 Did the occasion require this effort ? Has the protest been 
 raised too soon or made in tones too loud ? Am I to be 
 charged with taking affright at shadows and wasting my 
 indignation upon men of straw ? It is seldom wise to 
 revile or disparage an opponent. In the present instance 
 courtesy and loyalty would check any tendency to defame. 
 My criticisms were first provoked by the " Life of the 
 Prince Consort." The writer of that " Life " is not more 
 than adequately described as " an accomplished man of 
 letters," and we know it as a fact that an august personage 
 supplies materials for his pen, and deigns to supervise his 
 labours. For almost three-quarters of a century the 
 Quarterly Review has been the literary organ of one of the 
 two great political parties in the State. It exists for no 
 other reason than to teach the influential classes of this 
 country what they ought to think and how they ought to 
 act in political matters. I do not know whether a politician 
 conducts this important organ now, or who has the guar- 
 dianship of the pipes that connect it with the intellect of 
 the party, but it is highly significant that the tune it has 
 just been playing is the same that was struck up a few 
 months before by the instrumentalists at Windsor. The 
 Reviewer catches up one by one the strange notes which 
 were first heard there, and re-echoes them all, with many 
 an assonant variation. But we have to deal with facts as 
 well as words, with innovations wrought out in deeds as
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 65 
 
 well as expounded and recommended in dulcet writing. 
 The Administration of the Earl of Beaconsfield could hardly 
 have been other than it has been if the noble Israelite had 
 subscribed to the constitutional theories of Baron Stockmar 
 when he took the oath of office. As a writer in the Journal 
 des Debats observes, in criticising my former pamphlet, it is 
 only by occasional indiscretions, or by still rarer revelations, 
 that we know anything of what passes between the Crown 
 and the Cabinet ; but if it were proper to apply the maxims 
 of the inductive sciences to the recent acts of Lord Bea- 
 consheld's Administration, we should be led to tl/e con- 
 clusion that some such theory of the Constitution as the 
 redoubtable Baron Stockmar elaborated, and the Quarterly 
 Reviewer has since defended, has been adopted by the 
 Premier as a code of working rules, and that we are now 
 living under the Constitution as it issued, revised, amended, 
 and extended, from the brain of the Prince Consort's adviser 
 and King Leopold's pensioner. Constitutional questions as 
 affecting the relations between the Crown and Parliament 
 are happily not of very frequent occurrence, but there have 
 been three such questions within the last four years, and 
 two within the last three months. Knowing nothing directly 
 of what takes place behind the curtained penetralia of the 
 Executive, and shut up to such inferences as can be drawn 
 from the acts of Government, one would say that the Queen 
 has entered upon the part which she allowed to be ascribed 
 to her as of right in the " Life of the Prince Consort," that 
 she is already quietly recognised by her Ministers as the 
 permanent Premier of the Cabinet, and that the foreign
 
 66 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION, 
 
 affairs of the country at the present momentous crisis are 
 settled between her and the Earl of Beaconsfield. There 
 is no hardihood, there is no presumption in hazarding 
 such conjectures. The facts we observe appear to warrant 
 them, and facts are sacred. The theory they assume has 
 been presented to us under the literary sign-manual of 
 the Queen herself. The constitiitional delicacy which at 
 one time might have seemed to be strained and sullied 
 by mentioning them has been denounced under the 
 shadow of the same august authority as savouring of latent 
 Repul>licanism, and indicative of principles which can only 
 attain fruition by the downfall of the Monarchy. It there- 
 fore seems to be her Royal will that we should recognise 
 her hand in the phenomena of the political heavens, and 
 speak of her with as much openness and as little ceremony 
 as we use in speaking of her Ministers. A long course of 
 pious habit made me slow to use the privilege ; but when 
 events conspire with the Royal will to compel us either to 
 speak or to suffer wrong, then I yield to compulsion, I seize 
 the privilege as a right, and act accordingly. So I ask 
 again, putting all these facts together, is not the present 
 Constitutional crisis one that not only merits and warrants 
 but imperatively demands the use I have made of it ? Are 
 we to go on sleeping while we know that an enemy is privily 
 sowing tares in our fathers' wheatcrofts ? Are we to remain 
 dumb while the Constitution is travestied before our eyes, 
 and writers who would at one time have been called venal 
 try to mystify us with their special pleading and to argue 
 us out of our birthright ? Nothing less than this is intended
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 67 
 
 if we accept the authority of the Reviewer, and some of the 
 means he suggests are remarkable. Baron Stockmar had 
 already urged that, "as matters now stand, the necessary 
 equilibrium of the Constitution can only be established and 
 maintained by throwing a well-merited and deeply-seated 
 popularity on the side of the Sovereign into the scale against 
 the Democratic element which has become so powerful in 
 the House of Commons." The old man, with a delicacy 
 which the countrymen of Goethe may appreciate, even 
 ventured to maintain that the House of Lords had found 
 a safeguard against the wild power of Democracy in " the 
 moral purity " of the Queen. The Reviewer descends to 
 more trivial particulars. He enumerates the " number of 
 farmers " who rode with the Royal party through Dunstable 
 in 1841, nearly " smothering them with dust." He refers 
 to what took place at the distribution of the Crimean 
 medals to the first batch of returned veterans, when " from 
 the highest Prince of the blood to the lowest private, all 
 received the same distinction for the bravest conduct in the 
 severest actions, and the rough hand of the brave and honest 
 private soldier came for the first time in contact with that 
 of their Sovereign and their Queen." This is an extract 
 from one of the Queen's letters to the King of the Belgians, 
 and the Reviewer cries out in ecstacy, "Let those who 
 think that all feudal feeling is extinct in England read 
 this." Even smaller acts of Royal kindness are not 
 deemed too insignificant to be dwelt upon. He tells us 
 that "many a widow of a lost miner, or a drowned sailor, 
 has been cheered by the expression of Her Majesty's
 
 68 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 sympathy with her suffering ; many a hero of humble 
 station has exulted at the thought that his conduct has 
 merited the notice and approval of his Sovereign." The 
 Reviewer is well fitted to follow in the footsteps of Baron 
 Stockmar with his "moral purity." I marvel greatly at 
 his taste, but I marvel more at the invidious light in 
 which he seeks to place the most ordinary expressions of 
 the Queen's kindheartedness. We all know the goodness 
 of her nature. We know how keenly she feels when any of 
 her subjects suffer under exceptionally severe calamities, 
 and when the newspapers tell us of the kind inquiries she 
 has made, or of the marks of sympathy she has shown, we 
 say to ourselves that it is like the Queen, and that it is very 
 good of her. But the Reviewer contrives to take the bloom 
 off these gracious acts. He reduces them to the level of a 
 mercantile transaction, and finds a place for them in the 
 Constitution. They help to construct a barrier against 
 Democracy. They are so much fuel to be put into the 
 boiler of loyalty for getting up the steam. They are like 
 the arts by which children are humoured in order to be 
 ruled. They belong to the machinery of Imperialism, the 
 essence of which consists in adopting, not from kindness, 
 but from calculation, the ways of an indulgent father or a 
 rich uncle, so that the people may be merry in their chains 
 and induced to kiss the rod. In the words of the Reviewer, 
 those acts of Royal kindness, and the demonstrations of 
 loyalty which everywhere attend the Queen, indicate "a 
 perpetual gravitation of the Crown and the people towards 
 each other, tending to close up the breach that was made
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION, 69 
 
 in the Royal authority by the Revolution." All roads lead 
 to London, and so even by these idyllic footpaths, strewn 
 with the blossoms of Royal compassion, we are led back to 
 the problem which German medico-philosophers, accom- 
 plished men of letters, eloquent Quarterly Reviewers, and 
 scheming statesmen with their hands on the helm of power 
 are endeavouring to work out, the problem being how most 
 effectually and with the least noise to roll back the history 
 of England two hundred years. The task they have under- 
 taken is, "to close up the breach that was made in the 
 Royal authority by the Revolution;" that is, to make the 
 authority of our Kings and Queens what it was before it was 
 broken in upon and curtailed, for their benefit and for ours, 
 by the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. The pro- 
 posal itself has a sinister look for the present dynasty. The 
 Queen is asked to recur to the political principles of a 
 period when the title-deeds by which she reigns had not 
 been made out, and to violate the terms upon which the 
 estate is held. Her ancestors were offered the Crown of 
 England upon certain express conditions ; they accepted it 
 subject to those conditions, and we are now told that we 
 must annul the conditions, and render the ownership 
 absolute. Of course, if the contract were to be broken, both 
 parties would resume their rights, and a Convention of 
 1880 might have to take up the lapsed work of the Conven- 
 tion of 1689. But it is all moonshine. The doctrines of 
 the Reviewer are treasonable, but they are also impracticable, 
 and that is a good deal better. The course of the Constitu- 
 tion since 1688 has not been one of deterioration, but
 
 7o THK CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 of regular and natural development, and it can no 
 more be changed into what it was then than a river 
 can be made to flow back towards its source. The 
 last of the Stuarts used to touch for the King's Evil. 
 The prerogative of healing scrofula appertained to the 
 Crown of England for six hundred years, and was only 
 lost by the Revolution, when the transfer of the Crown 
 from the legitimate to another line was supposed to hav^e 
 destroyed the charm. This lost prerogative will be restored 
 whenever the rest are restored. Happily the people of 
 England have a distaste for violent changes. They love the 
 past, and instead of breaking with it the\ want to carry it 
 along with them into the days that are to come. The force 
 of events, springing out of and controlled by the national 
 character, has transformed our ancient Monarchy into a 
 form of government only in one respect distinguishable 
 from a Republic. It is a Crowned Republic. It has its 
 elected presidents, its First Ministers, who receive from 
 time to time the mandates of the nation, who do the 
 hard and responsible work of Government, and in 
 time give place to others ; but above them there is a 
 continuing Sovereignty, so styled as a mark of honour ; a 
 King or Queen, who under our settled law reigns by 
 hereditary right. Who would wish to be blind to, or 
 seek to quench, the lustre which surrounds that title, 
 the noblest and most illustrious borne by any potentate 
 on earth ? We love to adorn the wearer of it with all pos- 
 sible perfections, to see graciousness in his smile and benig- 
 nity in his actions. If he has any faults we try not to see
 
 THE CROWN AND THE CONSTITUTION 71 
 
 them, and we resent with a touch of wounded affection any 
 conduct on his part that clashes with the fiction of his blame- 
 lessness. We honour him as representing the unity, the 
 greatness, and the majesty of the nation ; as a living symbol 
 of authority and law ; as the last link in a grand historic 
 chain of renowned names and stately reputations, which con- 
 nects the England of to-day with its rude beginnings, and 
 helps us to feel our oneness with the famous men of old. 
 Such is the case now, and such it may be for a period so 
 long that no one can pretend to foresee its close, if the spirit 
 of the compact between Crown and People is faithfully 
 observed, and reasonableness gives free scope to the modify- 
 ing and mellowing influences of time. Is this position one 
 that needs aggrandising to make it worthy of an occupier ? 
 Is it one which a Queen who respects herself cannot deign 
 to fill with utter fidelity to its attendant limits and condi- 
 tions? I believe not, I trust not, for in spite of what 
 theorists may say I love to move on quietly, without being 
 disturbed by auguries of revolution. It is out of this loyalty 
 that I have spoken. My aim is to deprecate revolutionary 
 changes, not to provoke them. But my love of freedom is 
 greater than my fear of change, and I am of those who agree 
 to follow her at all risks. In the meantime only those are 
 loyal who venture to tell the truth. Flattery is always false 
 and base, but the State itself has need to take warning when 
 it is uttered or acted too near the Throne, and next to having 
 a noble-minded and gracious Queen, the greatest blessing 
 for which we ought to pray is that Heaven may always send 
 her honest men to guide her counsels.