Page:The English Constitution (1894).djvu/327

Rh letters the king consents to make a reasonable number of peers if required to pass the second reading of the Reform Bill, but owing to desertion of the “Waverers” from the Tories, the second reading is carried without it by nine, and then the king refuses to make peers, or at least enough peers when a vital amendment is carried by Lord Lyndhurst, which would have destroyed, and was meant to destroy the Bill. In consequence, there was a tremendous crisis and nearly a Revolution. A more striking example of well-meaning imbecility is scarcely to be found in history. No one who reads it carefully will doubt that the discretionary power of making peers would have been far better in Lord Grey’s hands than in the king’s. It was the uncertainty whether the king would exercise it, and how far he would exercise it, that mainly animated the opposition. In fact, you may place power in weak hands at a revolution, but you cannot keep it in weak hands. It runs out of them into strong ones. An ordinary hereditary sovereign—a William IV., or a George IV.—is unfit to exercise the peer-creating power when most wanted. A half-insane king, like George III., would be worse. He might use it by unaccountable impulse when not required, and refuse to use it out of sullen madness when required.

The existence of a fancied check on the premier is in truth an evil, because it prevents the enforcement of a real check. It would be easy to provide by law that an extraordinary number of Peers—say more than ten annually—should not be created except on a vote of some large majority, suppose three-fourths of the Lower House.