the appointment of cabinets by parties grew up in the manner Macaulay has described so well. Up to the latest period the sovereign was supposed, to a mischievous extent, to interfere in the choice of the persons to be Ministers. When George III finally became insane, in 1810, every one believed that George IV, on assuming power as Prince Regent, would turn out Mr Perceval’s government and empower Lord Grey or Lord Grenville, the Whig leaders, to form another. The Tory ministry was carrying on a successful war—a war of existence—against Napoleon; but in the people’s mind, the necessity at such an occasion for an unchanged government, did not outweigh the fancy that George IV was a Whig. And a Whig, it is true, he had been before the French Revolution, when he lived an indescribable life in St James’s Street with Mr Fox. But Lord Grey and Lord Grenville were rigid men, and had no immoral sort of influence. What liberalism of opinion the Regent ever had was frightened out of him (as of other people) by the Reign of Terror. He felt, according to the saying of another monarch, that ‘he lived by being a royalist.’ It soon appeared that he was most anxious to retain Mr Perceval, and that he was most eager to quarrel with the Whig Lords. As we all know, he kept the ministry whom he found in office; but that it should have been thought he could then change them, is a significant example how exceedingly modern our notions of the despotic action of Parliament in fact are.

By the steps of the struggle thus rudely mentioned (and by others which I have no room to speak of, nor need I), the change which in the Greek cities was effected both in appearance and in fact, has been effected in England, though in reality only, and not in outside. Here, too, the appendages of a monarchy have been converted into the essence of a republic; only here, because of a more numerous heterogeneous political population, it is needful to keep the ancient show while we secretly interpolate the new reality.

This long and curious history has left its trace on almost every part of our present political condition; its effects lie at the root of many of our most important controversies; and because these effects are not rightly perceived, many of these controversies are misconceived.

One of the most curious peculiarities of the English People is its dislike of the executive government. We are not in this respect ‘un vrai peuple moderne,’ like the Americans. The Americans conceive of their executive as one of their appointed agents; when it intervenes in common life, it does so, they consider, in virtue of the mandate of the sovereign people, there is no invasion or dereliction of freedom in that people interfering with itself. The French, the Swiss, and all nations who breathe the full atmosphere of the nineteenth century, think so too. The material necessities of this age require a strong executive; a nation destitute of it cannot be clean, or healthy, or vigorous like a nation possessing it. By definition, a nation calling itself free should have no jealousy of the executive, for freedom means that the nation, the political part of the nation, wields the executive. But our history has reversed the English feeling: our freedom is the result of centuries of resistance, more or less legal, or more or less illegal, more or less audacious, or more or less timid, to the executive Government. We have, accordingly, inherited the traditions of conflict, and preserve them in the fullness of victory. We look on State action, not as our own action, but as alien action; as an imposed tyranny from without, not as the consummated result of our own organised wishes. I remember at the Census of 1851 hearing a very sensible old lady say that ‘the liberties of England were at an end;’ if Government might be thus inquisitorial, if they might ask who slept in your house, or what your age was, what, she argued, might they ask and what might they not do.

The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority. The introduction of effectual policemen was not liked. I know people, old people I admit, who to this day consider them an infringement of freedom, and an imitation of the gendarmes of France. If the original policemen had been started with the present helmets, the result might have been dubious; there might have been a cry of military tyranny, and the inbred insubordination of the English people might have prevailed over the very modern love of perfect peace and order. The old notion that the Government is an extrinsic agency still rules our imaginations, though it is no longer true, and though in calm and intellectual moments we well know it is not. Nor is it merely our history which produces this effect; we might get over that, but the results of that history co- operate. Our double Government so acts: when we want to point the antipathy to the executive, we refer to the jealousy of the Crown, so deeply imbedded in the very substance of constitutional authority; so many people are loath to admit the Queen, in spite of law and fact, to be the people’s appointee and