A. Lawrence Lowell

“ Neither the parliamentary system nor the party system, neither the responsibility of ministers to the House of Commons nor the permanent division into two parties, grew up in a day. Throughout the eighteenth century the principle of cabinet responsibility was but dimly recognised; while parties at times disintegrated, and the wheels of government were kept going by means of corruption, which has served in all ages as a lubricant for ill-adjusted political machinery. ”

“ And the same trait that was apparent sociologically has been exposed in this our antipodal phase of psychical research. We have seen how impersonal is his language, the principal medium of communication between one soul and another; how impersonal are the communings of his soul with itself. How the man turns to nature instead of to his fellowman in silent sympathy. And how, when he speculates upon his coming castles in the air, his most roseate desire is to be but an indistinguishable particle of the sunset clouds and vanish invisible as they into the starry stillness of all-embracing space. ”

“ If they dislike to abandon a machine, they have a still greater aversion to repealing an Act of Parliament. Every Briton happily believes that it is better to readjust the institutions of a country slowly, than to pull them down and build anew; and there being no line between the institutions that are fundamental, and those that are not, a fragment of the veneration for the British Constitution attaches to every statute ”

“ It is not likely that the stranger would be noticed simply from its appearance until it had attained the eleventh magnitude. It would then be one hundred and forty-nine astronomical units from the Sun or at five times the distance of Neptune. But its detection would come about not through the eye of the body, but through the eye of the mind. Long before it could have attracted man’s attention to itself directly its effects would have betrayed it. Previous, indeed, to its possible showing in any telescope the behavior of the outer planets of the system would have revealed its presence. ”

“ But in order to determine the real import of an attempt to fetter the independence of a member of Parliament, one must consider how far it introduced a new practice into English politics, and for what purposes the claim of the association to call the member to account has been used. The question whether a member of Parliament is the agent of his constituents, morally bound to carry out their wishes, or whether he is to act solely according to his own opinion of the interest of the whole kingdom, is as old as Burke's famous discussion with the electors of Bristol. ”

“ From his own active and ambitious nature, Percival little required such a stimulus; and, indeed, he struck out an intellectual path of his own in boyhood. He took to astronomy, read many books thereon, had a telescope of his own, of about two and a quarter inches in diameter, with which he observed the stars from the flat roof of our house; and later in life he recalled that with it he had seen the white snow cap on the pole of Mars crowning a globe spread with blue-green patches on an orange ground. ”

“ The fact is that Irish problems lie beyond the experience of the English member and his constituents. Being unable to distinguish readily a real grievance from an unreasonable demand, he does not heed it until he is obliged to; and the cabinet, with its hands already full, is not inclined to burn its fingers with matters in which the House is not deeply or generally interested. All this is merely one of many illustrations of the truth that parliamentary government can work well only so far as the nation itself is fairly homogeneous in its political aspirations. ”

“ The President of the United States, for example, is the representative of a party; but he rules the nation only in part. The legislature is neither in theory or in practice under his control; and this is so far true that even when Congress is of the same party as himself, neither he nor any committee of the party so controls both executive and legislative that any one body can be said to rule the nation. But where the parliamentary system prevails, the cabinet, virtually combining in its own hands, as it does, the legislative and executive authorities, may fairly be said to rule the nation ”

“ The greatest political dignitary in the British government, the one endowed by law with the most exalted and most diverse functions, the only great officer of state who has retained his ancient rights, the man who defies the doctrine of the separation of powers more than any other personage on earth, is the Lord Chancellor. ”

“ The men who win places in the ministry have usually, although by no means invariably, made their mark in debate. It is a strange assumption that a good talker must be a good administrator, and that a strong government can be formed by parcelling out the offices among the leading [62] debaters in the legislative body. At first sight it appears as irrational as the other corollary of the parliamentary system, that the public service is promoted by dismissing an excellent foreign minister, because the House of Commons does not like an unpopular clause in an education bill. ”

“ If the English system of private bill legislation has its defects, they are far more than outweighed by its merits. The curse of most representative bodies at the present day is the tendency of the members to urge the interests of their localities or their constituents. It is this more than anything else that has brought legislatures into discredit, and has made them appear to be concerned with a tangled skein of private interests rather than with the public welfare. ”

“ Now the very accentuation of party has made it easier for the peers to resist a Liberal ministry, because in doing so they are evidently opposing, not the people as a whole, but only a part of the people, and a part that is a majority by a very small fraction. In this way it has happened that the House of Lords, without ceasing to have an opinion of its own on other matters, has become for party purposes an instrument in the hands of the Tory leaders, who use it as a bishop or knight of their own colour on the chess-board of party politics. ”

“ It would be obviously improper, not to say absurd, that the King in the selection of a new Prime Minister should be obliged to follow the opinion of the old one who has just resigned in consequence of a change of party in the House of Commons. That Mr. Balfour, for example, should have had the right to dictate whether Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman or Lord Rosebery should be his successor would have been grotesque. There is usually one recognised leader of the Opposition, and when that is the case the Crown must intrust the formation of the new ministry to him. ”

“ Now to a layman, and even to a foreign lawyer, an English act is often difficult to understand, and sometimes misleading. To penetrate its intent one must frequently be familiar with all previous legislation on the subject. It is no doubt true that "No statute is completely intelligible as an isolated enactment. Every statute is a chapter, or a fragment of a chapter, of a body of law." ”

“ On the contrary, one is much more impressed in ordinary times by the efforts of an organising secretary, spurred on from above, to interest people in forming associations in unpromising districts, than by struggles for power in the most active associations. In England the stage at which public interest awakes is the election, the process of selecting the candidates arousing little attention. While, therefore, the franchise is wide, and the number of people who vote is very great, the nomination is really made by a body of men no larger than the voters in an ordinary borough before 1832. ”

“ Again, in the United States, the provision that the electoral college shall choose the President has become so modified in practice that the electors must vote for the candidate nominated by the party to which they owe their own election. In choosing the President they have become, by the force of custom, as much a mere piece of mechanism as the Crown in England when giving its assent to acts passed by the two Houses of Parliament. Their freedom of choice is as obsolete as the royal veto. ”

“ In England the party system is no more in accord with the strictly legal institutions, with King, Lords and Commons, than it is elsewhere; but it is in absolute harmony with those conventions, which, although quite unknown to the law, make up the actual working constitution of the state. It is in harmony with them because they were created by the warfare of parties, were evolved out of party life. Government by a responsible ministry was not the inevitable consequence of the long struggle between the House of Commons and the Crown. ”

“ The administration of Ireland has been the conspicuous failure of the English government. Its history for a century has been a long tale of expedients, palliations and concessions, which have never availed to secure either permanent good order or the contentment and loyalty of the inhabitants. Each step has been taken, not of foresight, but under pressure. ”

“ A voter at the last election who objected strongly to any change in fiscal policy, and equally strongly to any concessions on the subject of Home Rule, found himself on the horns of a dilemma. He was compelled to make up his mind which issue he thought most important, and trust to Providence about the other. In a party government, where the cabinet must resign if any of its vital measures are rejected, those measures cannot be considered by individuals on their merits. ”

“ It tends to lose all powers except the power to criticise and the power to sentence to death. Parliament has been called the great inquest of the nation, and for that purpose its functions have of late been rather enlarged than impaired. Nor are the inquisitors confined to any one section of the House, for while that part is played chiefly by the Opposition, the government often receives a caution from its own supporters also. If the parliamentary system has made the cabinet of the day autocratic, it is an autocracy exerted with the utmost publicity, under a constant fire of criticism ”

“ The rulers of the country, and those who both have been and will be her rulers, fight at close range across a table for six months of the year, and during the rest of the time they carry on the ceaseless war by public speaking. As in the Athenian democracy, the citizens witness a constant struggle among rival statesmen for supremacy, but in England they are merely spectators until a general election summons them to give their verdict. One can hardly conceive of a system better calculated to stimulate interest in politics without instability in the government. ”

“ The cabinet has its finger always on the pulse of the House of Commons, and especially of its own majority there; and it is ever on the watch for expressions of public feeling outside. Its function is in large part to sum up and formulate the desires of its supporters, but the majority must accept its conclusions, and in carrying them out becomes well-nigh automatic. ”

“ Now, a power to provoke a referendum or appeal to the people, which is always used in favour of one party and against the other, however popular it may be at a given moment, and however much it may be permanently satisfactory to the party that it helps, cannot fail in the long run to be exceedingly annoying to its rival; nor is it likely to commend itself to the great mass of thinking men as a just and statesmanlike institution. The House of Lords is a permanent handicap in favour of the Tories, which is believed to have helped them even in elections for the House of Commons. ”