English constitution

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cal 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 com-

mon life, it does so, they consider, in virtue of the mandate of the sover-

eign people, and 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 pos-

sessing it. By definition, a nation calling itself free should have no jeal-

ousy 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, inher-

ited the traditions of conflict, and preserve them in the fulness of vic-

tory. 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 organized 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 not 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 free-

dom, and an imitation of the gendarmes of France. If the original police-

men 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

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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 agent, that it is a good rhetorical emphasis to speak of her preroga-

tive as something non-popular, and therefore to be distrusted. By the

very nature of our Government our executive cannot be liked and trusted

as the Swiss or the American is liked and trusted.

Out of the same history and the same results proceed our tolerance

of those “local authorities” which so puzzle many foreigners. In the

struggle with the Crown these local centres served as props and ful-

crums. In the early parliaments it was the local bodies who sent mem-

bers to parliament, the counties, and the boroughs; and in that way, and

because of their free life, the parliament was free too. If active, real

bodies had not sent the representatives, they would have been power-

less. This is very much the reason why our old rights of suffrage were so

various; the Government let whatever people happened to be the stron-

gest in each town choose the members. They applied to the electing

bodies the test of ‘natural selection;’ whatever set of people were locally

strong enough to elect, did so. Afterwards, in the civil war, many of the

corporations, like that of London, were important bases of resistance.

The case of London is typical and remarkable. Probably, if there is any

body more than another which an educated Englishman now-a-days re-

gards with little favour, it is the Corporation of London. He connects it

with hereditary abuses perfectly preserved, with large revenues imper-

fectly accounted for, with a system which stops the principal city gov-

ernment at an old archway, with the perpetuation of a hundred detest-

able parishes, with the maintenance of a horde of luxurious and useless

bodies. For the want of all which makes Paris nice and splendid we

justly reproach the Corporation of London; for the existence of much of

what makes London mean and squalid we justly reproach it too. Yet the

Corporation of London was for centuries a bulwark of English liberty.

The conscious support of the near and organized capital gave the Long

Parliament a vigour and vitality which they could have found nowhere

else. Their leading patriots took refuge in the City, and the nearest ap-

proach to an English “sitting in permanence” is the committee at

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Guildhall, where all members “that came were to have voices.” Down to

George III’s time the City was a useful centre of popular judgment.

Here, as elsewhere, we have built into our polity pieces of the scaffold-

ing by which it was erected.

De Tocqueville indeed used to maintain that in this matter the En-

glish were not merely historically excusable, but likewise politically

judicious. He founded what may be called the culté of corporations.

And it was natural that in France, where there is scarcely any power of

self-organization in the people, where the préfet must be asked upon

every subject, and take the initiative in every movement, a solitary thinker

should be repelled from the exaggerations of which he knew the evil, to

the contrary exaggeration of which he did not. But in a country like

England, where business is in the air, where we can organize a vigilance

committee on every abuse and an executive committee for every remedy

—as a matter of political instruction, which was De Tocqueville’s point

— we need not care how much power is delegated to outlying bodies,

and how much is kept for the central body. We have had the instruction

municipalities could give us: we have been through all that. Now we are

quite grown up, and can put away childish things.

The same causes account for the innumerable anomalies of our pol-

ity. I own that I do not entirely sympathize with the horror of these

anomalies which haunts some of our best critics. It is natural that those

who by special and admirable culture have come to look at all things

upon the artistic side, should start back from these queer peculiarities.

But it is natural also that persons used to analyze political institutions

should look at these anomalies with a little tenderness and a little inter-

est. They may have something to teach us. Political philosophy is still

more imperfect; it has been framed from observations taken upon regu-

lar specimens of politics and States; as to these its teaching is most

valuable. But we must ever remember that its data are imperfect. The

lessons are good where its primitive assumptions hold, but may be false

where those assumptions fail. A philosophical politician regards a po-

litical anomaly as a scientific physician regards a rare disease — it is to

him an “interesting case.” There may still be instruction here, though

we have worked out the lessons of common cases. I cannot, therefore,

join in the full cry against anomalies; in my judgment it may quickly

overrun the scent, and so miss what we should be glad to find.

Subject to this saving remark, however, I not only admit, but main-

tain, that our constitution is full of curious oddities, which are impeding

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and. mischievous, and ought to be struck out. Our law very often re-

minds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time

tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like

a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the

devious tracts of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing

fields, you may often find the change half complete. Just so the lines of

our constitution were framed in old eras of sparse population, few wants,

and simple habits; and we adhere in seeming to their shape, though

civilization has come with its dangers, complications, and enjoyments.

These anomalies, in a hundred instances, mark the old boundaries of a

constitutional struggle. The casual line was traced according to the

strength of deceased combatants; succeeding generations fought else-

where; and the hesitating line of a half-drawn battle was left to stand for

a perpetual limit.

I do not count as an anomaly the existence of our double govern-

ment, with all its infinite accidents, though half the superficial pecu-

liarities that are often complained of arise out of it. The co-existence of

a Queen’s seeming prerogative and a Downing Street’s real government

is just suited to such a country as this, in such an age as ours. 12

Notes

1. It is said that at the end of the cabinet which agreed to propose a fixed

duty on corn, Lord Melbourne put his back to the door, and said,

“Now is it to lower the price of corn, or isn’t it? It is not much matter

which we say, but mind, we must all say the same.” This is the most

graphic story of a cabinet I ever heard, but I cannot vouch for its

truth. Lord Melbourne’s is a character about which men make sto-

ries.

2. It is worth observing that even during the short existence of the Con-

federate Government these evils distinctly showed themselves. Al-

most the last incident at the Richmond Congress was an angry finan-

cial correspondence with Jefferson Davis.

3. I leave this passage to stand as it was written, just after the assassina-

tion of Mr. Lincoln, and when every one said Mr. Johnson would be

very hostile to the South.

4. The framers of the constitution expected that the vice-president would

be elected by the Electoral College as the second wisest man in the

country. The vice-presidentship being a sinecure, a second-rate man

agreeable to the wire-pullers is always smuggled in. The chance of

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succession to the presidentship is too distant to be thought of.

5. In accordance with a recent resolution of the House of Lords, proxies

are now disused. Note to second edition.

6. This of course relates to the assemblies of the Empire.

7. Now Lord Salisbury, who when this was written was Indian Secre-

tary. Note to second edition.

8. I am happy to state that this evil is much diminishing. The improve-

ment of school education of the middle class in the last twenty-five

years is marvellous.

9. This was written just after the close of the civil war, but I do not know

that the great problem stated in it has as yet been adequately solved.

10. Of course I am not speaking here of the South and South-East, as

they now are. How any free government is to exist in societies where

so many bad elements are so much perturbed, I cannot imagine.

11. Since the first edition of this book was published, several valuable

works have appeared, which, on many points, throw much light on

our early constitutional history, especially Mr. Stubbs’ Select Char-

ters and other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, from

the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First, Mr. Freeman’s

lecture on The Growth of the English Constitution, and the chapter

on the Anglo-Saxon Constitution in his History of the Norman Con-

quest but we have not yet a great and authoritative work on the whole

subject such as I wished for when I wrote the passage in the text, and

as it is most desirable that we should have.

12. So well is our real Government concealed, that if you tell a cabman

to drive to “Downing Street” he most likely will never have heard of

it, and will not in the least know where to take you. It is only a “dis-

guised republic” which is suited to such a being as the Englishman in

such a century as the nineteenth.