succeed them, and will not restrict the licence which may soon be its own. Large "Patronage" oils the wheels of Government. Besides the expectants of office, the supporters of each party hope to be more or less dispensers or recipients of patronage. Surely we need not wonder that Parliament has no effective control of lax, vicious, ill-directed expenditure and of ill-bestowed appoint

ments.

When supporters of a Ministry look to receive as their reward some share of patronage, this is a real payment for their votes, an indirect bribery. That as a system it exists, confessed and unrebuked, is undeniable, when the "Whipper-in" will even threaten "never again to ask a member for his vote" if he is shy to give it on an occasion desired. He is clearly aware that the report of names which he can make at the Treasury may affect the members' interests. Yet surely each M.P. is under moral and urgent duty to vote according to his personal convictions of right, and not make a minister's convenience paramount.

We need not here inquire whether an oath or a solemn affirmation is exacted of an M.P. Suppose the latter; then our first step of cure here obvious is, to add to it the solemn avowal, "I will never ask a minister to give patronage or promotion to any one, except if this be my official duty." Side by side with this every holder of patronage ought in ancient Roman fashion to avow solemnly, "I will recommend for every office the best man I can find (optimum quemque) without regard to personal favour."

Many will pretend that because kings have so often violated oaths (and in Hungary written engagements too), therefore oaths or solemn affirmations for office are vain and hurtful. I think this a dangerous mistake. Manifestly Parliament knows that no check to bribery is so effective as making the Committees for its restraint judicial. So long as they are not, they have little conscience against acquitting the guilty. The real dislike to make the engagement judicial is the conviction that it will be disagree ably effective.

We are not worse than the old Romans. Their consuls elected to the Senate by favouritism, while it was not disreputable. When a Plebeian Bill vested the election in the censors under oath to elect "every best man," the improvement was immense, and the Senate became really a body of their "best men; until through the vast slaughter of Senators by Hannibal, a well-meaning Dictator, changed (by his precedent!) the election into one of routine.

Of our public men, too many are unscrupulous, while they may decide by the law of Expediency; for they feel it highly inexpedient to damage and offend the powerful. But if they have made Solemn Promise to decide by Merit, surely the number of the unscrupulous will be gravely lessened.

Moreover, the struggle for such an addition to the public engagement of Parliamentary men would awaken the nation's conscience; thus the very discussion would do good.

Not that I expect any high improvement of which we can be proud without changes still more cardinal, as to which some other nations have preceded us. First, No Foreign Treaty must be valid until ratified in Parliament. Out of Treaties most of our wars arise, by aid of Secret Diplomacy; and the Cabinet having control of a movable fleet, does not ask leave of Parliament to use it as an instrument of terror. Next, the Ministers ought not to be eligible to Parliament, or have Legislative as well as Executive duties. Not only are different qualities and capacities needed for the double service, but the result follows, that while the vote of Legislators ought to be as sacred as the verdict of Jurors, they are liable to be scolded as traitors to a Party, cantankerous and unprincipled (!) if they follow their best light. Thirdly, Here, as in the American Union, every high officer should hold his diploma dependent separately on appointment of a superior (the Sovereign or the President) with the consent of the Legislature. Thus he would be liable to separate ejection if the Legislature withdrew its consent. Against such a broad duty and privilege of the House, no Premier would dare to threaten a strike of his whole Cabinet.

PARTY GOVERNMENT.

From the Westminster Review, 1858, condensed and greatly abridged.

ENGLAND collectively has not made up its mind what

organic changes are desirable; but we may without rashness assert that the nation, as distinct from the public' men and from the journalists, is weary of Government by Party. By what means National Policy may supersede Party Government is a truly difficult question, because the evil is an immorality supported by immoral theory which infests nearly all public men; hence we are as yet a long way off from the cure. Never was in old days the nation more of one accord to restrict Royal power than now in disgust with Party rule. Interests which in a petty State are despicable, become monstrous when they pervert the government of a great Empire. A personal contest for mere power, among those who have been entrusted to do battle for Right, is a dereliction of a statesman's duty. Simple minds understand and feel that the Right and the True ought to be the most precious of interests, and are apt to assume that our chosen legislators and high officers are morally incapable of consciously sacrificing truth to serve their party. At the same time, even those whose worldly experience has blunted sensitiveness, are often scandalised at the weltering helplessness of Parliament, and the strange scarcity of possible leaders. The dreary alternations of Russell-Palmerston, Derby-Disraeli, Aberdeen-Russell, Palmerston-Russell, Palmerston consul sine collega, and Derby-Disraeli again, make a jingle worse than Chinese music. It seems as though the petty resentments of some, the inordinate claims of others, the banding together under two or three chiefs, drive the Queen and the nation to their wits' end for a government. What right have they to introduce a private personal organisation, not so much an Imperium in Imperio as a faction and cabal, aiming to secure that neither Queen nor Parliament shall control them ?* Some such as these, from various points of view, are the mutterings of the nation.

*Note in 1885.-The above was written before it was known that Prince Albert had a Belgian Baron (Stockmar) as his secret Foreign Secretary;

Meanwhile the statesmen appear to scorn, as absurd ignorance, the idea that Parliamentary Government can have any practical meaning, but the holding of the high executive and the initiation of law in the hands of a party leader. To have two parties and two only, seems to them a natural necessity. They look with indignation, suspicion, or contempt on a public man, who, except on the rarest occasion, separates himself from his party to vote for the right or against the wrong. Such a man is thought to play a conceited or even dishonourable part, and manifest his utter unfitness for office, to which he is regarded as bidding adieu for ever.

As with War, so with Party, a morality comes in appropriate to it. To become a spy, to use a false passport, to steal on the enemy by night, to give him false information, are honourable in war corresponding deceptions are honourable in party warfare. War forbids those violences as mere cruelty, which do not conduce to victory: Party also forbids those attacks which do not tend to a secure possession of power. Especially whatever tends to increase the power of Parliament over Ministers, such as a Coalition of statesmen between whom very little difference remains, is flouted with grave rebuke, as weakening the ascendency of office-holders and degrading them into obedience to the legislature. The Statesmen know their own game, and pursue it continuously, on system, with unanimity. Party, indeed, is opposed to Party; but neither Party will oppose the principle of Party Government. Our bureaucracies on neither side will drive the other to despair, lest the beaten Party betake itself to honest Nationality.

Whigs and Tories would persuade us that we live under a Responsible Government, but no real responsibility appears. Of course we do not mean that any minister can with impunity break the law to the hurt of a private person; the people themselves would resist any attempts at the old lawlessness of the Executive. But for wickedness of policy, as the entering on unjust war without debate in Parliament, the engaging in treaties eminently foolish, or by their injustice certain to entail war, even for unjust war followed by disaster, they are not punishable even by personal censure, much less by exclusion from future office. In every Ministry the policy on each topic is settled by that the Imperium in Imperio was that of the Prince, who (with Her Majesty's warm approval) claimed to control Foreign Affairs; and that the English Ministers did not dare to reveal this entanglement.

strictly private conference; and, after it is settled, each member is expected to act for it and argue for it, as if he sincerely approved it. It is never certain that even the ostensible chief himself has since reapproved of his own policy. To sustain this system it is made a primary duty to conceal how each voted in the Cabinet, and (we understand) no record of this is kept. This is the essential difference between a Cabinet (which is a mere unconstitutional clique) and a legitimate Privy Council, such as that of Queen Elizabeth. The modern Cabinet Ministers have no individual responsibility; the responsibility (so called) is only collective. Guilt cannot be fastened on anyone, unless it amounted to high treason implicating one and all. For immense folly or actual wickedness to the foreigner the collective punishment is a temporary ejection from office; a lot which ordinarily befalls the most innocent of cabinets from natural causes, as from the death of a leading man. In general, the disgust which ejects them is cumulative. They manage to resign on some small pretence, in order to evade any Parliamentary specializing of the main offence which they have given.

All this might seem transparent, but it is not superfluous to illustrate our argument by a particular case. No one any longer defends the Afghan war [of 1839]. Its direct object was criminal-that of imposing a king on a people who hated him, imposing him, not because we thought him likely to rule well or to have any sacred claims, but because we desired to have on that throne a puppet of our own creation, submissive to our policy. To achieve this object we forced our way through Sind and the Punjaub, laying the foundation of new wars. The immediate result of these violences was, to the Afghans, much ravage and desolation, to us the horrible slaughter of a noble army, twenty-three millions sterling added to the Indian debt, and a permanent deficit in the Indian treasury. The invasion of India by the Sikhs was a secondary result. How much the loss of reputation has contributed to the recent Indian insurrection, no one can compute. It has been said that four persons planned and achieved this Afghan war; but no one has been called to account; all public debate, coming when the evils were irretrievable, was judged fruitless. Parliament knows well how impossible it is to visit the crimes of policy on the head of the authors, however deadly the results to the Empire.

Constitutional lawyers tell us that for purely legal reasons,