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The English Constitution

W >> Walter Bagehot >> The English Constitution




But, on the contrary, the party zeal and the self-seeking of
Parliament are best checked by an authority which has no connection
with Parliament or dependence upon it--supposing that such authority
is morally and intellectually equal to the performance of the
entrusted function. The Prime Minister obviously being the nominee
of a party majority is likely to share its feeling, and is sure to
be obliged to say that he shares it. The actual contact with affairs
is indeed likely to purify him from many prejudices, to tame him of
many fanaticisms, to beat out of him many errors. The present
Conservative Government contains more than one member who regards
his party as intellectually benighted; who either never speaks their
peculiar dialect, or who speaks it condescendingly, and with an
"aside"; who respects their accumulated prejudices as the "potential
energies" on which he subsists, but who despises them while he lives
by them. Years ago Mr. Disraeli called Sir Robert Peel's Ministry--
the last Conservative Ministry that had real power--"an organised
hypocrisy," so much did the ideas of its "head" differ from the
sensations of its "tail". Probably he now comprehends--if he did not
always--that the air of Downing Street brings certain ideas to those
who live there, and that the hard, compact prejudices of opposition
are soon melted and mitigated in the great gulf stream of affairs.
Lord Palmerston, too, was a typical example of a leader lulling,
rather than arousing, assuaging rather than acerbating the minds of
his followers. But though the composing effect of close difficulties
will commonly make a Premier cease to be an immoderate partisan, yet
a partisan to some extent he must be, and a violent one he may be;
and in that case he is not a good person to check the party. When
the leading sect (so to speak) in Parliament is doing what the
nation do not like, an instant appeal ought to be registered and
Parliament ought to be dissolved. But a zealot of a Premier will not
appeal; he will follow his formulae; he will believe he is doing
good service when, perhaps, he is but pushing to unpopular
consequences, the narrow maxims of an inchoate theory. At such a
minute a constitutional king--such as Leopold the First was, and as
Prince Albert might have been--is invaluable; he can and will
prevent Parliament from hurting the nation.

Again, too, on the selfishness of Parliament an extrinsic check is
clearly more efficient than an intrinsic. A Premier who is made by
Parliament may share the bad impulses of those who chose him; or, at
any rate, he may have made "capital" out of them--he may have seemed
to share them. The self-interests, the jobbing propensities of the
assembly are sure indeed to be of very secondary interest to him.
What he will care most for is the permanence, is the interest--
whether corrupt or uncorrupt--of his own Ministry. He will be
disinclined to anything coarsely unpopular. In the order of nature,
a new assembly must come before long, and he will be indisposed to
shock the feelings of the electors from whom that assembly must
emanate. But though the interest of the Minister is inconsistent
with appalling jobbery, he will be inclined to mitigated jobbery. He
will temporise; he will try to give a seemly dress to unseemly
matters: to do as much harm as will content the assembly, and yet
not so much harm as will offend the nation. He will not shrink from
becoming a particeps criminis; he will but endeavour to dilute the
crime. The intervention of an extrinsic, impartial, and capable
authority--if such can be found--will undoubtedly restrain the
covetousness as well as the factiousness of a choosing assembly.

But can such a head be found? In one case I think it has been found.
Our colonial governors are precisely Dei ex machina. They are always
intelligent, for they have to live by a different trade; they are
nearly sure to be impartial, for they come from the ends of the
earth; they are sure not to participate in the selfish desires of
any colonial class or body, for long before those desires can have
attained fruition they will have passed to the other side of the
world, be busy with other faces and other minds, be almost out of
hearing what happens in a region they have half forgotten. A
colonial governor is a super-Parliamentary authority, animated by a
wisdom which is probably in quantity considerable, and is different
from that of the local Parliament, even if not above it. But even in
this case the advantage of this extrinsic authority is purchased at
a heavy price--a price which must not be made light of, because it
is often worth paying. A colonial governor is a ruler who has no
permanent interest in the colony he governs; who perhaps had to look
for it in the map when he was sent thither; who takes years before
he really understands its parties and its controversies; who, though
without prejudice himself, is apt to be a slave to the prejudices of
local people near him; who inevitably, and almost laudably, governs
not in the interest of the colony, which he may mistake, but in his
own interest, which he sees and is sure of. The first desire of a
colonial governor is not to get into a "scrape," not to do anything
which may give trouble to his superiors--the Colonial Office--at
home, which may cause an untimely and dubious recall, which may hurt
his after career. He is sure to leave upon the colony the feeling
that they have a ruler who only half knows them, and does not so
much as half care for them. We hardly appreciate this common feeling
in our colonies, because WE appoint THEIR sovereign; but we should
understand it in an instant if, by a political metamorphosis, the
choice were turned the other way--if THEY appointed OUR sovereign.
We should then say at once, "How is it possible a man from New
Zealand can understand England? how is it possible, that a man
longing to get back to the antipodes can care for England? how can
we trust one who lives by the fluctuating favour of a distant
authority? how can we heartily obey one who is but a foreigner with
the accident of an identical language?"

I dwell on the evils which impair the advantage of colonial
governorship because that is the most favoured case of super-
Parliamentary royalty, and because from looking at it we can bring
freshly home to our minds what the real difficulties of that
institution are. We are so familiar with it that we do not
understand it. We are like people who have known a man all their
lives, and yet are quite surprised when he displays some obvious
characteristic which casual observers have detected at a glance. I
have known a man who did not know what colour his sister's eyes
were, though he had seen her every day for twenty years; or rather,
he did not know because he had so seen her: so true is the
philosophical maxim that we neglect the constant element in our
thoughts, though it is probably the most important, and attend
almost only to the varying elements--the differentiating elements
(as men now speak)--though they are apt to be less potent. But when
we perceive by the roundabout example of a colonial governor how
difficult the task of a constitutional king is in the exercise of
the function of dissolving Parliament, we at once see how unlikely
it is that an hereditary monarch will be possessed of the requisite
faculties.

An hereditary king is but an ordinary person, upon an average, at
best; he is nearly sure to be badly educated for business; he is
very little likely to have a taste for business; he is solicited
from youth by every temptation to pleasure; he probably passed the
whole of his youth in the vicious situation of the heir-apparent,
who can do nothing because he has no appointed work, and who will be
considered almost to outstep his function if he undertake optional
work. For the most part, a constitutional king is a DAMAGED common
man; not forced to business by necessity as a despot often is, but
yet spoiled for business by most of the temptations which spoil a
despot. History, too, seems to show that hereditary royal families
gather from the repeated influence of their corrupting situation
some dark taint in the blood, some transmitted and growing poison
which hurts their judgments, darkens all their sorrow, and is a
cloud on half their pleasure. It has been said, not truly, but with
a possible approximation to truth, "That in 1802 every hereditary
monarch was insane". Is it likely that this sort of monarchs will be
able to catch the exact moment when, in opposition to the wishes of
a triumphant Ministry, they ought to dissolve Parliament? To do so
with efficiency they must be able to perceive that the Parliament is
wrong, and that the nation knows it is wrong. Now to know that
Parliament is wrong, a man must be, if not a great statesman, yet a
considerable statesman--a statesman of some sort. He must have great
natural vigour, for no less will comprehend the hard principles of
national policy. He must have incessant industry, for no less will
keep him abreast with the involved detail to which those principles
relate, and the miscellaneous occasions to which they must be
applied. A man made common by nature, and made worse by life, is not
likely to have either; he is nearly sure not to be BOTH clever and
industrious. And a monarch in the recesses of a palace, listening to
a charmed flattery unbiassed by the miscellaneous world, who has
always been hedged in by rank, is likely to be but a poor judge of
public opinion. He may have an inborn tact for finding it out; but
his life will never teach it him, and will probably enfeeble it in
him.

But there is a still worse case, a case which the life of George
III.--which is a sort of museum of the defects of a constitutional
king--suggests at once. The Parliament may be wiser than the people,
and yet the king may be of the same mind with the people. During the
last years of the American war, the Premier, Lord North, upon whom
the first responsibility rested, was averse to continuing it, and
knew it could not succeed. Parliament was much of the same mind; if
Lord North had been able to come down to Parliament with a peace in
his hand, Parliament would probably have rejoiced, and the nation
under the guidance of Parliament, though saddened by its losses,
probably would have been satisfied. The opinion of that day was more
like the American opinion of the present day than like our present
opinion. It was much slower in its formation than our opinion now,
and obeyed much more easily sudden impulses from the central
administration. If Lord North had been able to throw the undivided
energy and the undistracted authority of the executive Government
into the excellent work of making a peace and carrying a peace,
years of bloodshed might have been spared, and an entail of enmity
cut off that has not yet run out. But there was a power behind the
Prime Minister; George III. was madly eager to continue the war, and
the nation--not seeing how hopeless the strife was, not
comprehending the lasting antipathy which their obstinacy was
creating--ignorant, dull and helpless--was ready to go on too. Even
if Lord North had wished to make peace, and had persuaded Parliament
accordingly, all his work would have been useless; a superior power
could and would have appealed from a wise and pacific Parliament to
a sullen and warlike nation. The check which our Constitution finds
for the special vices of our Parliament was misused to curb its
wisdom.

The more we study the nature of Cabinet government, the more we
shall shrink from exposing at a vital instant its delicate machinery
to a blow from a casual, incompetent, and perhaps semi-insane
outsider. The preponderant probability is that on a great occasion
the Premier and Parliament will really be wiser than the king. The
Premier is sure to be able, and is sure to be most anxious to decide
well; if he fail to decide, he loses his place, though through all
blunders the king keeps his; the judgment of the man naturally very
discerning is sharpened by a heavy penalty, from which the judgment
of the man by nature much less intelligent is exempt. Parliament,
too, is for the most part a sound, careful and practical body of
men. Principle shows that the power of dismissing a Government with
which Parliament is satisfied, and of dissolving that Parliament
upon an appeal to the people, is not a power which a common
hereditary monarch will in the long run be able beneficially to
exercise.

Accordingly this power has almost, if not quite, dropped out of the
reality of our Constitution. Nothing, perhaps, would more surprise
the English people than if the Queen by a coup d'etat and on a
sudden destroyed a Ministry firm in the allegiance and secure of a
majority in Parliament. That power, indisputably, in theory, belongs
to her; but it has passed so far away from the minds of men that it
would terrify them, if she used it, like a volcanic eruption from
Primrose Hill. The last analogy to it is not one to be coveted as a
precedent. In 1835 William IV. dismissed an administration which,
though disorganised by the loss of its leader in the Commons, was an
existing Government, had a Premier in the Lords ready to go on, and
a leader in the Commons willing to begin. The king fancied that
public opinion was leaving the Whigs and going over to the Tories,
and he thought he should accelerate the transition by ejecting the
former. But the event showed that he misjudged. His PERCEPTION
indeed was right; the English people were wavering in their
allegiance to the Whigs, who had no leader that touched the popular
heart, none in whom Liberalism could personify itself and become a
passion--who besides were a body long used to opposition, and
therefore making blunders in office--who were borne to power by a
popular impulse which they only half comprehended, and perhaps less
than half shared. But the king's POLICY was wrong; he impeded the
reaction instead of aiding it. He forced on a premature Tory
Government, which was as unsuccessful as all wise people perceived
that it must be. The popular distaste to the Whigs was as yet but
incipient, inefficient; and the intervention of the Crown was
advantageous to them, because it looked inconsistent with the
liberties of the people. And in so far as William IV. was right in
detecting an incipient change of opinion, he did but detect an
erroneous change. What was desirable was the prolongation of Liberal
rule. The commencing dissatisfaction did but relate to the personal
demerits of the Whig leaders, and other temporary adjuncts of free
principles, and not to those principles intrinsically. So that the
last precedent for a royal onslaught on a Ministry ended thus:--in
opposing the right principles, in aiding the wrong principles, in
hurting the party it was meant to help. After such a warning, it is
likely that our monarchs will pursue the policy which a long course
of quiet precedent at present directs--they will leave a Ministry
trusted by Parliament to the judgment of Parliament.

Indeed, the dangers arising from a party spirit in Parliament
exceeding that of the nation, and of a selfishness in Parliament
contradicting the true interest of the nation, are not great dangers
in a country where the mind of the nation is steadily political, and
where its control over its representatives is constant. A steady
opposition to a formed public opinion is hardly possible in our
House of Commons, so incessant is the national attention to
politics, and so keen the fear in the mind of each member that he
may lose his valued seat. These dangers belong to early and
scattered communities, where there are no interesting political
questions, where the distances are great, where no vigilant opinion
passes judgment on Parliamentary excesses, where few care to have
seats in the chamber, and where many of those few are from their
characters and their antecedents better not there than there. The
one great vice of Parliamentary government in an adult political
nation, is the caprice of Parliament in the choice of a Ministry. A
nation can hardly control it here; and it is not good that, except
within wide limits, it should control it. The Parliamentary judgment
of the merits or demerits of an administration very generally
depends on matters which the Parliament, being close at hand,
distinctly sees, and which the distant nation does not see. But
where personality enters, capriciousness begins. It is easy to
imagine a House of Commons which is discontented with all statesmen,
which is contented with none, which is made up of little parties,
which votes in small knots, which will adhere steadily to no leader,
which gives every leader a chance and a hope. Such Parliaments
require the imminent check of possible dissolution; but that check
is (as has been shown) better in the Premier than in the sovereign;
and by the late practice of our constitution, its use is yearly
ebbing from the sovereign, and yearly centring in the Premier. The
Queen can hardly now refuse a defeated Minister the chance of a
dissolution, any more than she can dissolve in the time of an
undefeated one, and without his consent.

We shall find the case much the same with the safety-valve, as I
have called it, of our Constitution. A good, capable, hereditary
monarch would exercise it better than a Premier, but a Premier could
manage it well enough; and a monarch capable of doing better will be
born only once in a century, whereas monarchs likely to do worse
will be born every day.

There are two modes in which the power of our executive to create
Peers--to nominate, that is, additional members of our upper and
revising chamber--now acts: one constant, habitual, though not
adequately noticed by the popular mind as it goes on; and the other
possible and terrific, scarcely ever really exercised, but always by
its reserved magic maintaining a great and a restraining influence.
The Crown creates peers, a few year by year, and thus modifies
continually the characteristic feeling of the House of Lords. I have
heard people say, who ought to know, that the ENGLISH peerage (the
only one upon which unhappily the power of new creation now acts) is
now more Whig than Tory. Thirty years ago the majority was
indisputably the other way. Owing to very curious circumstances
English parties have not alternated in power, as a good deal of
speculation predicts they would, and a good deal of current language
assumes they have. The Whig party were in office some seventy years
(with very small breaks) from the death of Queen Anne to the
coalition between Lord North and Mr. Fox; then the Tories (with only
such breaks), were in power for nearly fifty years, till 1832; and
since, the Whig party has always, with very trifling intervals, been
predominant. Consequently, each continuously-governing party has had
the means of modifying the Upper House to suit its views. The
profuse Tory creations of half a century had made the House of Lords
bigotedly Tory before the first Reform Act, but it is wonderfully
mitigated now. The Irish Peers and Scotch Peers--being nominated by
an almost unaltered constituency, and representing the feelings of
the majority of that constituency only (no minority having any
voice)--present an unchangeable Tory element. But the element in
which change is permitted has been changed. Whether the English
Peerage be or be not predominantly now Tory, it is certainly not
Tory after the fashion of the Toryism of 1832. The Whig additions
have indeed sprung from a class commonly rather adjoining upon
Toryism, than much inclining to Radicalism. It is not from men of
large wealth that a very great impetus to organic change should be
expected. The additions to the Peers have matched nicely enough with
the old Peers, and therefore they have effected more easily a
greater and more permeating modification. The addition of a
contrasting mass would have excited the old leaven, but the delicate
infusion of ingredients similar in genus, though different in
species, has modified the new compound without irritating the old
original.

This ordinary and common use of the peer-creating power is always in
the hands of the Premier, and depends for its characteristic use on
being there. He, as the head of the predominant party, is the proper
person to modify gradually the permanent chamber which, perhaps, was
at starting hostile to him; and, at any rate, can be best harmonised
with the public opinion he represents by the additions he makes.
Hardly any contrived constitution possesses a machinery for
modifying its secondary house so delicate, so flexible, and so
constant. If the power of creating life peers had been added, the
mitigating influence of the responsible executive upon the House of
Lords would have been as good as such a thing can be.

The catastrophic creation of peers for the purpose of swamping the
Upper House is utterly different. If an able and impartial exterior
king is at hand, this power is best in that king. It is a power only
to be used on great occasions, when the object is immense, and the
party strife unmitigated. This is the conclusive, the swaying power
of the moment, and of course, therefore, it had better be in the
hands of a power both capable and impartial, than of a Premier who
must in some degree be a partisan. The value of a discreet, calm,
wise monarch, if such should happen to be reigning at the acute
crisis of a nation's destiny, is priceless. He may prevent years of
tumult, save bloodshed and civil war, lay up a store of grateful
fame to himself, prevent the accumulated intestine hatred of each
party to its opposite. But the question comes back, Will there be
such a monarch just then? What is the chance of having him just
then? What will be the use of the monarch whom the accidents of
inheritance, such as we know them to be, must upon an average bring
us just then?

The answer to these questions is not satisfactory, if we take it
from the little experience we have had in this rare matter. There
have been but two cases at all approaching to a catastrophic
creation of peers--to a creation which would suddenly change the
majority of the Lords--in English history. One was in Queen Anne's
time. The majority of peers in Queen Anne's time were Whig, and by
profuse and quick creations Harley's Ministry changed it to a Tory
majority. So great was the popular effect, that in the next reign
one of the most contested Ministerial proposals was a proposal to
take the power of indefinite peer creation from the Crown, and to
make the number of Lords fixed, as that of the Commons is fixed. But
the sovereign had little to do with the matter. Queen Anne was one
of the smallest people ever set in a great place. Swift bitterly and
justly said "she had not a store of amity by her for more than one
friend at a time," and just then her affection was concentrated on a
waiting-maid. Her waiting-maid told her to make peers, and she made
them. But of large thought and comprehensive statesmanship she was
as destitute as Mrs. Masham. She supported a bad Ministry by the
most extreme of measures, and she did it on caprice. The case of
William IV. is still more instructive. He was a very conscientious
king, but at the same time an exceedingly weak king. His
correspondence with Lord Grey on this subject fills more than half a
large volume, or rather his secretary's correspondence, for he kept
a very clever man to write what he thought, or at least what those
about him thought. It is a strange instance of high-placed weakness
and conscientious vacillation. After endless letters the king
consents to make a REASONABLE number of peers if required to pass
the second reading of the Reform Bill, but owing to desertion of the
"Waverers" from the Tories, the second reading is carried without it
by nine, and then the king refuses to make peers, or at least enough
peers when a vital amendment is carried by Lord Lyndhurst, which
would have destroyed, and was meant to destroy the Bill. In
consequence, there was a tremendous crisis and nearly a revolution.
A more striking example of well-meaning imbecility is scarcely to be
found in history. No one who reads it carefully will doubt that the
discretionary power of making peers would have been far better in
Lord Grey's hands than in the king's. It was the uncertainty whether
the king would exercise it, and how far he would exercise it, that
mainly animated the opposition. In fact, you may place power in weak
hands at a revolution, but you cannot keep it in weak hands. It runs
out of them into strong ones. An ordinary hereditary sovereign--a
William IV., or a George IV.--is unfit to exercise the peer-creating
power when most wanted. A half-insane king, like George III., would
be worse. He might use it by unaccountable impulse when not
required, and refuse to use it out of sullen madness when required.

The existence of a fancied check on the Premier is in truth an evil,
because it prevents the enforcement of a real check. It would be
easy to provide by law that an extraordinary number of peers--say
more than ten annually--should not be created except on a vote of
some large majority, suppose three-fourths of the Lower House. This
would ensure that the Premier should not use the reserve force of
the constitution as if it were an ordinary force; that he should not
use it except when the whole nation fixedly wished it; that it
should be kept for a revolution, not expended on administration; and
it would ensure that he should then have it to use. Queen Anne's
case and William IV.'s case prove that neither object is certainly
attained by entrusting this critical and extreme force to the chance
idiosyncrasies and habitual mediocrity of an hereditary sovereign.

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