636 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of which would not be tried by differences of opinion about measures 

 of legislation. The state would not be deprived, as it is now, of the 

 services of a first-rate administrator, say of finance or of foreign af- 

 fairs, because he happened to be in the minority on some legislative 

 question. It is very well for Burke to say that men of the other con- 

 nection are not to be proscribed ; but proscribed under the party 

 system they are and must always be. 



Ought there to be a second Chamber ? That there ought, is an 

 article of the political creed formed on a supposed inspection of the 

 British Constitution. Imitation of the British Constitution, without 

 discriminating between forms and realities, has led Europe a strange 

 dance. Great Britain can hardly be said to have a constitution in the 

 proper sense of the term. She has a series of enactments, from the 

 Great Charter to the Bill of Rights, limiting the power of the Crown 

 and securing the liberty of the subject. Apart from this she has 

 nothing but a balance of political forces, determined by a long strug- 

 gle, if balance it can be called, when the political power of the Crown 

 has been reduced almost to nothing, and that of the Lords to a frag- 

 ment of what it once was, since they can make no permanent stand on 

 important questions themselves, though a stand may be made by the 

 representatives of tbeir order and interest in the House of Commons. 

 There are traditions, no doubt, which in England herself have been 

 fixed by long practice and handed on by a group of political families, 

 notwithstanding which some important points, such as the rights of the 

 House of Commons with regard to the approval of treaties, are still in 

 an unsettled state ; but out of England these traditions fail, and, when 

 Canada is set to govern herself according to " the well-understood 

 principles of the British Constitution," it soon appears that these prin- 

 ciples are not so well understood, or at least not so religiously ob- 

 served, by colonial politicians struggling for place, as by the members 

 of the Carlton and the Reform Club. The written constitutions which 

 all the nations of Europe have framed for themselves embody the 

 forms not the realities of parliamentary government in England. 

 They give the appointment of ministers to the king ; the consequence 

 of which, in Spain for example, is that the stress of the struggle for 

 power rests just where British practice forbids it to rest, that is to say 

 on the Crown ; and every change of ministry is accomplished by an 

 intrigue of the palace or an insurrection. A group of conspirators 

 forces itself upon the monarch, and then, there being no political life 

 in the nation, nominates a Parliament of its own followers, sometimes 

 so far forgetting constitutional decorum as entirely to leave out the 

 opposition ; and this is called an adoption of the British Constitution. 



The House of Lords has been everywhere taken for a second 

 Chamber or Senate. It is nothing of the kind. It is one of the estates 

 of the feudal realm, reduced by the decay of feudalism to comparative 

 impotence, such influence as it retains being that, not of legislative au- 



