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TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



and is seldom quoted by American politicians. 

 The legislative power is the sovereign power. 

 But Montesquieu believed that the sovereign 

 power, in the case of the British Constitution, 

 was really divided among king, Lords, and Com- 

 mons. He also believed that the legislative, ex- 

 ecutive, and judiciary powers were not only dis- 

 tinct, but independent of each other, and that 

 the mutual independence of those powers was the 

 palladium of constitutional government. 



The British Constitution is a single elective 

 assembly, in which the whole of the legislative, 

 and therefore the whole of the sovereign power 

 is really vested. This assembly virtually ap- 

 points the members of the executive, who are the 

 leaders of its majority, and through the execu- 

 tive the ministers of justice. Round it still cling, 

 as it were, the wrecks of an old feudal monarchy 

 and of an old feudal House of Peers, but from 

 both of them the power has long passed away, to 

 centre in the Commons, though, strange to say, 

 not only foreign observers, but English statesmen, 

 long remained unconscious of the fact. 



Whether the sovereign power, which could 

 not be divided, should be vested in the crown or 

 in the representatives of the people, was the ques- 

 tion which, after vain attempts to settle it by de- 

 bate, was fought out with arms between the Par- 

 liament and the Stuarts. It was decided, after a 

 century of conflict and several vicissitudes of for- 

 tune, in favor of the representatives of the peo- 

 ple, who finally triumphed in 1688. From that 

 time the monarchy has been faineant, interfering 

 with the government only by means of back-stairs 

 influence, or by forming for itself, underhand, a 

 party in the House of Commons, as it did during 

 part of the reign of George III. William III., 

 being the head and the general of a European 

 coalition, kept for his life the Foreign Office and 

 the War-Office in his own hands ; but after a 

 slight resistance, ending with his attempt to veto 

 the Triennial Act, he was obliged to relinquish 

 every other kind of power ; and, in the reign of 

 his successor, the transfer of the sovereignty to 

 Parliament was complete. As to the House of 

 Lords, it has no power left in itself but that of 

 obstruction on minor questions ; on great ques- 

 tions it merely registers the vote of the majority 

 of the House of Commons. This was settled in 

 1832, in the case of the Reform Bill, and again in 

 1846, in the case of the Corn Laws. On both 

 those occasions the measures would notoriously 

 have been rejected by an overwhelming majority, 

 had the House of Lords been an independent as- 

 sembly. The result showed that it was nothing 



of the kind. King, Lords, and Commons work 

 together harmoniously in England, not because 

 each of them exercises its share of the sovereign 

 power temperately, and with due respect for the 

 rights of the others, which is the common and 

 the orthodox belief, but because two of them are 

 politically non-existent. Restore real sovereignty 

 to the crown, and you will have the Stuarts and 

 the Long Parliament over again. 



Following, however, as they thought, the suc- 

 cessful example of England, the framers of the 

 French Constitution of 1789 attempted to divide 

 the sovereign power, leaving a portion of it in the 

 king, and vesting the remainder in the represen- 

 tatives of the people. The result, the inevitable 

 result, was collision, and soon a conflict which, 

 though neither party knew it, was essentially in- 

 ternecine. The weaker, that is to say, the mon- 

 archy, fell ; but, in the desperate efforts necessary 

 to get rid of the opposing force and to vindicate 

 the sovereignty to itself, foreign intervention add- 

 ing to the fury of the conflict and to the general 

 difficulties of the crisis, the nation fell into con- 

 vulsions, into the reign of violence, into the Ter- 

 ror, and after the Terror into military dictator- 

 ship and despotism. The same fatal situation 

 was reproduced under the restored monarchy; 

 again an attempt was made to divide the sover- 

 eign power between the king and the Assembly 

 which represented the nation. In which of the two 

 that power should rest, was the issue once more 

 really debated through all those fierce sessions 

 of the Restoration Legislature, while the ground 

 heaved with conspiracy, and ever and anon the 

 mutterings of civil war were heard in the streets. 

 At last Charles X. made a desperate effort to cut 

 the knot and render himself sovereign ; by his 

 failure and fall the question of sovereignty was 

 decided for the time in favor of the representa- 

 tives of the people. What power Louis Philippe 

 retained was retained not of right (for he sub- 

 scribed to the doctrine that he was to be guided 

 by constitutional advisers assigned him by the 

 majority in the Chambers), but by personal in- 

 fluence and corruption. It was in corruption, in 

 fact, that monarchical power made clandestinely 

 its last stand. Louis Philippe's fall, as we have 

 already said, was due not so much to political 

 causes, in the proper sense of the term, as to 

 Chauvinism conspiring against a bourgeois king, 

 whose policy was peace, though he yielded too 

 much to the fancied necessity of sacrificing, by 

 military display and menace, to the idol of war. 

 At the same time the fresh impulse given to the 

 revolutionary movement in Europe by the strug- 



