English government

“ Measured by the standards of duration, absence of violent commotions, maintenance of law and order, general prosperity and contentment of the people, and by the extent of its influence on the institutions and political thought of other lands, the English government has been one of the most remarkable the world has ever known. ”

“ The distinctive aim of English political development has been to obtain its objects by enlarging the powers of Parliament, while the fundamental purpose of the American people was to make a general government so constituted as to preserve both the rights of the States and people. ”

“ Englishmen who make comparisons between their own political system and that of countries whose constitutions have been reshaped within the present century would do well to consider the state of English government in the latter part of the eighteenth century, after a hundred years of constitutional freedom. ”

“ The British Empire will need all the wisdom it can command, if it is to hold its own in the parliament of reason or the arbitrament of war.
CHAPTER IX ENGLISH DEMOCRACY The modern national state is the most powerful political organism ever known, because it is the conscious or unconscious agency of a people's will. Government is no longer in England the instrument of a family or a class; and the only real check upon its power is the circumstance that in some matters it acts as the executive committee of one party and is legitimately resisted by the other. ”

“ In this Empire all power and law proceed in form from the occupant of the throne. It is the English way, as it was the Roman, and as it is that of Nature, to preserve carefully the form of things while the contents change. All legislation in the United Kingdom proceeds in form from the King, and Parliament assents. Monarchy, however much tempered by aristocracy and democracy, is, as it always has been, the essential form of English Government. As Empire has grown, this source of legislation and power has irrigated an increasing and now vast area. ”

“ Everything in the English government appears to me the reverse of what it ought to be, and of what it is said to be. The Parliament, imperfectly and capriciously elected as it is, is nevertheless supposed to hold the national purse in trust for the nation; but in the manner in which an English Parliament is constructed it is like a man being both mortgagor and mortgagee, and in the case of misapplication of trust it is the criminal sitting in judgment upon himself. ”

“ In all questions between a government and an individual, the presumption in every Englishman's mind is that the government is in the wrong. And when the resident English bring the batteries of English political action to bear upon any of the bulwarks erected to protect the natives against their encroachments, the executive, with their real but faint velleities of something better, generally find it safer to their Parliamentary interest, and, at any rate, less troublesome, to give up the disputed position than to defend it. ”

“ England has been called, and truly, "the mother of constitutions and the constitutional system." Our principles of national and individual liberty are so inseparable from true government that where they are not found, a real, beneficial, political institution does not exist. ”

“ To win over the chiefs, to turn them by policy and a patient generosity into English nobles, to use the traditional devotion of their tribal dependence as a means of diffusing the new civilization of their chiefs, to trust to time and steady government for the gradual reformation of the country, was a policy safer, cheaper, more humane, and more statesmanlike. ”

“ Originally possessed of almost absolute power, the English ruler, at the present day possesses very little actual power and influence, much less in fact than the people of the United States have entrusted to their President. The constitutional history of England is largely the narrative of the successive steps by which the people have wrested from royal hands and taken under their own control, the powers of government. ”

“ The question appears to us, to be no other, than, whether we are the subjects of absolute unlimited power, or of a free government, formed on the principles of the English constitution. If your Excellency's doctrine be true, the people of this province hold their lands of the Crown and people of England; and their lives, liberties, and properties, are at their disposal, and that, even by compact and their own consent. They were subject to the King as the head alterius populi of another people, in whose Legislative they have no voice or interest. ”

“ When an Englishman and an American meet, in this country or in England, they are friends, notwithstanding all that has passed; why not the two nations?
I have not presumed, and shall not presume, to touch on any question that has arisen or may arise between the Executive Government of my country and the Executive Government of yours. In England, Liberals have not failed to plead for justice to you, and, as we thought, at the same time, for the maintenance of English honor. ”

“ Such things constitute the spirit of the institutions of a country; that portion of their influence which is least regarded by common, and especially by English thinkers, though the institutions of every country, not under great positive oppression, produce more effect by their spirit than by any of their direct provisions, since by it they shape the national character. ”

“ Circumstances having thrown the English into the ranks of the government, and the folly of their opponents having placed them, on the other hand, in a state of permanent collision with it, the former possess the advantage of having the force of government, and the authority of the laws on their side in the present state of the contest. Their exertions during the recent troubles have contributed to maintain the supremacy of the law, and the continuance of the connexion with Great Britain ”

“ The entire governmental order of Great Britain hinges upon the parliamentary system, and nowhere has that system been reduced to satisfactory operation without the presence of some central, but essentially detached, figure, whether a king or, as in France, a president with the attributes of kingship. It is fundamentally because the English people have discerned that kingship is not necessarily incompatible with popular government that the monarchy has persisted. ”

“ This king appoints the judges, and the officers who appoint the juries; so does the president. Executive power in the Knglish foi m, has sufficed to introduce and establish the political elements of fraud and force. But the king of England is not elective. The inefficacy of election, to prevent the abuse of accumulated power, has been shewn; we see its inefficacy in the House of Commons, to shield the people against the oppressions of the English executive power. Cut the king of England, in the exercise of his patronage, is not checked by a senate. ”

“ Monarchy, it is said, has some faults, some bad tendencies, aristocracy others, democracy, again, others; but England has shown that a Government can be constructed in which these evil tendencies exactly check, balance, and destroy one another—in which a good whole is constructed not simply in spite of, but by means of, the counteracting defects of the constituent parts. ”

“ Cabinet government educates the nation; the presidential does not educate it, and may corrupt it. It has been said that England invented the phrase, "Her Majesty’s Opposition;" that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself. ”

“ Why has this sturdy class so dwindled in numbers, and left England infinitely the weaker for their decrease? The causes are several; social, economic, and political. The chief, perhaps, is the peculiar form of Government which came in with the Revolution. The landed gentry by that event became supreme, the national and local administration was entirely in their hands, and land being the foundation of social and political influence was eagerly sought by them where it was not already in their hands. ”

“ The French Foreign Office, wishful to allay the anger of the Parisian mob clamouring for war with England, secured this admirable couple and sent them round the town. You cannot be amused at a thing, and at the same time want to kill it. The French nation saw the English citizen and citizeness—no caricature, but the living reality—and their indignation exploded in laughter. The success of the stratagem prompted them later on to offer their services to the German Government, with the beneficial results that we all know. ”

“ A Ministry which forfeits the friendship of the Commons, cannot stand an hour, and supplies will stop until they are again in accord. In other words, the Government of England had become a Government of the people. ”

“ How could the Rice Ring go on skinning the unfortunate peasant if it hadn't the Government behind it? The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English--or rather to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen.'
'My friend, it iss pathetic to me to hear you talk so. ”

“ Can a class of men, capable of being condensed in a legislative chamber, under the eye of the king and the Commons, be found in Great Britain, possessing more virtue, wisdom and wealth, than the rest of the nation ”

“ It is not incited to form an opinion like a nation under a Cabinet government; nor is it instructed like such a nation. There are doubtless debates in the legislature, but they are prologues without a play. There is nothing of a catastrophe about them; you can not turn out the Government. The prize of power is not in the gift of the legislature, and no one cares for the legislature. The executive, the great centre of power and place, sticks irremovable; you cannot change it in any event. ”

“ Where due to an incorrect translation the scope of a patent granted on an international application designating the United States, which was not originally filed in the English language, exceeds the scope of the international application in its original language, a court of competent jurisdiction may retroactively limit the scope of the patent, by declaring it unenforceable to the extent that it exceeds the scope of the international application in its original language. ”

“ Instead of collecting all authority into one centre, that of the nation, they have established different bodies, a body of representatives, a council, and a governor, because there is in England a house of commons, a house of lords, and a king. They endeavor to balance these different powers, as if this equilibrium, which in England may be a necessary check to the enormous influence of royalty, could be of any use in republics founded upon the equality of all the citizens, and as if establishing different orders of men was not a source of divisions and disputes. ”

“ The Presidential Government, by its nature, divides political life into two halves, an executive half and a legislative half; and, by so dividing it, makes neither half worth a man's having—worth his making it a continuous career—worthy to absorb, as Cabinet government absorbs, his whole soul. The statesmen from whom a nation chooses under a Presidential system are much inferior to those from whom it chooses under a Cabinet system, while the selecting apparatus is also far less discerning. ”

“ England hath hitherto taken the lead in almost every thing great and good, and her citizens stand foremost in the annals of fame, as having shaken off the fetters which hung upon the human mind, and called it forth to the exertion of its noblest powers; and her constitution has been so far from receiving any injury from the efforts of these her free born enterprising sons, that she is, in part, indebted to them for the unrivalled reputation she now enjoys, of having the best system of policy in Europe. ”

“ The English nation ever recurs to its ancient institutions—the institutions that have alike secured freedom and order; and after all their ebullitions, we find them, when the sky is clear, again at work, and toiling on at their eternal task of accumulation. ”

“ The history of England during the hundred and seventy years which have elapsed since the House of Commons became the most powerful body in the state, her immense and still growing prosperity, her freedom, her tranquillity, her greatness in arts, in sciences, and in arms, her maritime ascendency, the marvels of her public credit, her American, her African, her Australian, her Asiatic empires, sufficiently prove the excellence of her institutions. But those institutions, though excellent, are assuredly not perfect. Parliamentary government is government by speaking. ”

“ No one can doubt that the New England States, if they were a separate community, would have an education, a political capacity, and an intelligence such as the numerical majority of no people, equally numerous, has ever possessed. In a State of this sort, where all the community is fit to choose a sufficient legislature, it is possible, it is almost easy, to create that legislature. If the New England States possessed a Cabinet government as a separate nation, they would be as renowned in the world for political sagacity as they now are for diffused happiness. ”

“ That, deeply impressed with the melancholy state of public concerns, they would, in the fullest information they could obtain, and with the most mature deliberation they could employ, review the whole of the late proceedings, that they might be enabled to discover, as they would be most willing to apply, the most effectual means of restoring order to the distracted affairs of the British empire, confidence to his majesty’s government, obedience, by a prudent and temperate use of its powers, to the authority of parliament, and satisfaction and happiness to all his people. ”