Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/656

636 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 affairs, 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 connection 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 struggle, 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 fragment 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 their 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 principles are not so well understood, or at least not so religiously observed, 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