Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/188

 When Bagehot pointed out that the Cabinet was virtually a Committee of the legislative body, and the real Executive elected by and responsible to the Legislature, he was simply putting together notorious facts. They had, no doubt, been more or less recognised. Yet he was not only clearing away a mass of useless formulæ, but almost making a discovery, and the rarest kind of discovery, that of the already known. He was exposing an error which had misled the ablest founders of the most remarkable of modern Constitutions. They were, without knowing it, exchanging the 'Cabinet' for the 'Presidential' system. Whether the Presidential system had or had not the disadvantages ascribed to it by Bagehot is a different question. At any rate it was true, as he said, that its founders, while intending to develop a system by accepting its ostensible principle, were really inverting it and acting upon a contradictory principle. To have disengaged the facts so clearly from the mass of conventional fictions was a remarkable achievement. Bagehot revealed a plain fact hidden from more pretentious philosophers who had been blinded by traditional formulæ.

Bagehot proceeded to draw conclusions which