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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



day, in the hands of a disloyal President and Sen- 

 ate, was so nearly the means of overturning the 

 Republic. In the days in which the power of 

 legislation, with the other attributes of sovereign- 

 ty, resided in the crown, and Parliaments were 

 merely consultative, or at most instruments for 

 supplying by the grant of subsidies the occasional 

 necessities of the crown, it was a matter of course 

 that they should be summoned only when the 

 crown needed their presence, and dismissed as 

 soon as their advice had been given and they had 

 voted their supplies. Our modern power of dis- 

 solution is a survival of this original state of 

 things. But with us it is no longer practically in 

 the hands of the king, or of any authority outside 

 Parliament ; it has passed, with the other at- 

 tributes of the sovereign power, to the Parliament 

 itself. It is exercised by a parliamentary minis- 

 ter, by whose advice the crown is bound on this 

 as on all other questions to be guided, for the 

 purpose of testing the relative position of parties 

 in the country ; and its exercise is limited to that 

 object by restrictions which, though tacit and to 

 be found in no book on constitutional law, are 

 perfectly understood and observed by both par- 

 ties as the rules of the game. It is in fact the 

 mode by which the House of Commons adjusts 

 itself to the public opinion which is the basis of 

 its power. This has not been seen by those who, 

 thinking to reproduce the British Constitution, 

 have vested in an authority really external to the 

 Parliament, such as the French Marshalate, a 

 power of dissolution, which is in fact a power 

 of extinguishing for the time, and may in dis- 

 loyal hands be used as a power of extinguish- 

 ing forever, the organ of the national sov- 

 ereignty, and the. national sovereignty itself. 

 We know well that, in the case of France, the 

 fault does not lie with the friends of the Repub- 

 lic; but it is not in France alone that the error 

 respecting the power of dissolution has pre- 

 vailed. 



Dissolutions and general elections are alike 

 obsolete bequests of old feudal polities ; and, 

 though by the practical temperament and the po- 

 litical experience of the English they have been 

 tacitly accommodated, like other parts of the 

 historic system, to the requirements of the pres- 

 ent day, they are alike in themselves evil as well 

 as obsolete. The existence of the Assembly, which 

 is the organ of the national sovereignty, and 

 without which the nation is practically powerless, 

 ought never to be suspended for an hour ; from its 

 supension in any country in which elective institu- 

 tions have still a disputed title, and arc threat- 



ened by hostile machinations, the most serious 

 dangers may arise. General elections are evil, be- 

 cause they bring on those violent conflicts of opin- 

 ion, and pitched battles between parties, which, 

 when the differences of sentiment are so extreme 

 as they are between the Ultramontanists and the 

 Liberals, the Legitimists and the Radicals, in 

 France, are in the highest degree perilous, and, 

 as the recent crisis has plainly indicated, might, 

 in a very inflamed state of feeling, lead at once 

 to an outbreak of violence and civil war. To 

 avert such conflicts, to avoid pitched battles of 

 opinion, to make the stream of political progress 

 glide within its banks, and with as few cataracts 

 as possible, ought to be the aim of all framers of 

 elective constitutions. An elective assembly re- 

 newed, not all at once, but by installments, and 

 at regular periods fixed by law, independent of 

 the will of any functionary, will fulfill the con- 

 dition of uninterrupted life, without which usurp- 

 ing governments, like that of De Broglie, may 

 always be tempted to suspend its existence or get 

 rid of it altogether ; and it will conform steadily, 

 yet promptly enough, to the changes of public 

 opinion, without those violent revolutions which 

 general elections are apt to produce, and without 

 giving the excessive predominance which they 

 are apt to give to the question or the cry of the 

 day. The necessity under which party leaders 

 find themselves of providing a question and a cry 

 for a general election has had a bad effect even 

 on English legislation. 



Another illusion which has led to strange con- 

 sequences in France, and in all other countries 

 where the building of constitutions has been go- 

 ing on, including the British colonies, is the no- 

 tion that the House of Lords is a Senate moderat- 

 ing by its mature wisdom the action of the more 

 popular House. As we have had occasion to say 

 elsewhere, the House of Lords is not a Senate ; 

 it is an old feudal estate of the realm : its action 

 has been, not that of ripe wisdom moderating 

 popular impulse, but simply that of privilege 

 combating, so far as it dared, all change, in the 

 interest of the privileged order. Whether its in- 

 fluence is really conservative may be doubted : 

 in the first place, because its resistance to change, 

 being unreasoning and anti-national, is very apt, 

 as the history of the first Reform Bill shows, to pro- 

 voke the revolutionary spirit rather than to allay 

 it ; and, in the second place, because it operates 

 as a practical ostracism of the great land-owners, 

 who, under the circumstances of English society, 

 would otherwise certainly find seats in the House 

 of Commons. The real stronghold of English 



