been greatly reduced. Even in the seventeenth century a statesman who was at the head of affairs might easily and without disrepute acquire* in no long time a fortune sufficient to support a dukedom. The salary of a minister of state was at the Revolution at least twice as great as the average income of a peer. Commissioners of Customs and Lords of the Bedchamber received at least fifty per cent. more than the average income of a member of the House of Commons. The regular salary, however, was the smallest part of the gains of an official in that age. What we should now call gross corruption was then practised without disguise and without reproach. "Titles, places, commissions, pardons, were daily sold in market overt by the highest dignitaries of the realm; and every clerk in every department imitated to the best of his power the evil example."+ Out of the disasters and the profligate expenditure of the American war a great change arose.‡ A new spirit was infused into the Government by the popular movement of 178o. A systematic order in the public finances was gradually introduced; and a sense of personal integrity, unknown either in our previous history or in the administration of most other countries, became confirmed. All irregular gains were cut off. Official incomes and official duties were revised. Since the Peace of 1815 the wealth of the country has advanced with such rapidity that the gains of private life far surpass the gains of office. At the present time there is hardly any political office which the majority of members of Parliament would, for the sake only of the salary, desire to have. Most of such offices, so far from being profitable, actually involve expense. Salaries have been reduced, while the rate of social expenditure has increased; and at the same time Macaulay, Hist. of Eng., i. 309. the men who are now returned to the House of Commons are usually so wealthy or so profitably engaged in their private affairs that they are reluctant in any circumstances to accept office. The influence, therefore, of Government has visibly decreased. So completely has the fear which haunted our grandfathers been dissipated that a few years ago the unlawful presence of five Under Secretaries in the House of Commons, to which four only are admissible, was generally regarded as an amusing blunder, and not as a matter of the slightest political importance. Such an incident would have excited very different feelings if it had happened eighty or ninety years ago, under the administration of Lord North and not of Lord Palmerston. So great has been the reduction of the Parliamentary influence of the Crown that some persons have thought that it is tending to produce, if it have not already produced, an organic change in the Constitution. They suppose that the administration ought always to command a majority in the House of Commons; and that a majority can only be obtained by exchanging patronage for support. Further, they hold that this barter was greatly facilitated by the small boroughs which the Reform Act swept away; and accordingly they were at the time unable to understand how after that measure "the King's Government was in future to be carried on." This esoteric doctrine of the Tory party, as it has been well called, has found an unexpected supporter in Earl Grey.* In his view the loose and uncertain ties of party, and the varied and often unreasonable motives that influence public men, require some stronger means of cohesion; and he thinks that in the reaction against former abuses we have in the usual manner run into the opposite extreme. Yet this opinion, * Parl. Govt., 99. notwithstanding the respect to which Earl Grey's authority is justly entitled, may well be doubted. The theory which permits the Executive to tamper with the body assigned for its control by the Constitution is indefensible.* The means by which the theory is carried into effect are vicious. The strength which is thus obtained is, as experience has amply shown, precarious, unstable, and unpopular. The inconveniences, so far as they are real, of the present system are either merely incidental to the transition from one state of things to a different state, or arise from the undue extension of Executive interference in matters that properly pertain to the Legislature alone. But it is probable that these evils are exaggerated. The old Governments were not always strong; the modern Governments are not always weak. Before the Reform Act, when public opinion was definite and decided, the ministry was strong; when public opinion is definite and decided, the ministry is strong now. No ministry in the days of unreformed Parliaments was stronger than that of Sir Robert Peel in 1841 or of Lord Palmerston in 1857. But of all the numerous administrations of George the Third the only strong ones were that of Mr. Pitt, and that which under various chiefs conducted to its close the great contest with Napoleon. Of Mr. Pitt's first Parliament, that which overwhelmed the forces of the Coalition, contemporary politicians said "that it was a very loose Parliament, and that Government had not a decisive hold upon it on any material question." In 1810 the Duke of Westminster contemptuously denies the Perceval Administration to be a Government; and asks what support could be expected from ministers that are beaten in the House of Commons *See National Review, x. 240. + Earl Stanhope's Life of Pitt, i. 288. Sir G. C. Lewis's Administrations, 322. three times a week. Some years afterwards we find the same illustrious person, then a leading member of the administration, complaining bitterly of the conduct of his supporters. He says "that the country gentlemen not only give individual votes against the Government," but "act in concert and as a party independent of and without consultation with the Government which they profess to support but really oppose;" and he declares that a sense of duty alone in the peculiar circumstances of the time induced him to retain his office. On several occasions indeed that administration,† so far from being a model of strength, seems to have been in a most precarious position. We may well believe that, partly in the exercise of the just and essential prerogatives of the Crown, and partly from the public sympathy and support which an efficient and conscientious performance of their duties is sure to obtain, a ministry of the present day has all the authority in Parliament that it needs or that it ought to possess. The actual organization of the administration and its political unity necessarily give it great influence; and its strength would probably be increased if it were understood that nothing short of a direct vote of want of confidence or a defeat on some question of unusual magnitude should cause a ministerial resignation. It must not be forgotten that our system of Parliamentary Government, and especially its latest development, is still very young; and that the general tone of public morality has within the last century experienced an extraordinary improvement. We are not to look back to the machinery of an obsolete system for the means of curing our defects. We ought rather to look forward for their remedy to that higher and better moral tone which we may reasonably expect. We need not therefore fear * Duke of Buckingham's Memoirs of Court of Geo. IV., i. 292. even a further diminution of this influence by better regulations for the Public Service. The real question is merely the benefit of the service. If that be secured, the old truth that corruption wins not more than honesty will approve itself. "There is no real cause," says Mr. Hallam,* "to apprehend that a virtuous and enlightened Government would find difficulty in resting upon the reputation justly due to it, especially when we throw into the scale that species of influence which must ever subsist, the sentiment of respect and loyalty to a Sovereign, of friendship and gratitude to a minister, of habitual confidence in those entrusted with power, of aversion to confusion and untried change, which have in fact more extensive operation than any sordid motives, and which must almost always render them unnecessary." from modern § 7. A result, which I have already had occasion to notice, of the separation of the personal and the official revenue, if I may so speak, of the Crown is the comAdvantages parative facility with which many important to Crown legislative reforms can now be made. In financial former times the interest of the King was a system. direct obstacle to almost every project of improvement. Edward the First objected to the free alienation of land because it tended to increase the number of his tenants who held not directly from the Crown but through the medium of some tenant in chief. Henry the Eighth objected to the free devising of land because he was thereby greatly wronged in the collection of his wardships and of his primer seisins. He proposed as a compromise to give a testamentary power over half the testator's lands in consideration of the Royal rights being *Const. Hist., iii. 264. |