, transferred from Tories to
Whigs and from Whigs to Tories. But no such class would have existed if
persons who received salaries from the Crown had been suffered to sit
without restriction in the House of Commons. Those commissionerships,
assistant secretaryships, chief clerkships, which are now held for life
by persons who stand aloof from the strife of parties, would have been
bestowed on members of Parliament who were serviceable to the government
as voluble speakers or steady voters. As often as the ministry was
changed, all this crowd of retainers would have been ejected from
office, and would have been succeeded by another set of members of
Parliament who would probably have been ejected in their turn before
they had half learned their business. Servility and corruption in the
legislature, ignorance and incapacity in all the departments of the
executive administration, would have been the inevitable effects of such
a system.

Still more noxious, if possible, would be the effects of a system
under which all the servants of the Crown, without exception, should be
excluded from the House of Commons. Aristotle has, in that treatise on
government which is perhaps the most judicious and instructive of all
his writings, left us a warning against a class of laws artfully framed
to delude the vulgar, democratic in seeming, but oligarchic in effect.
[374] Had he had an opportunity of studying the history of the English
constitution, he might easily have enlarged his list of such laws. That
men who are in the service and pay of the Crown ought not to sit in
an assembly specially charged with the duty of guarding the rights and
interests of the community against all aggression on the part of the
Crown is a plausible and a popular doctrine. Yet it is certain that if
those who, five generations ago, held that doctrine, had been able to
mould the constitution according to their wishes, the effect would have
been the depression of that branch of the legislature which springs from
the people and is accountable to the people, and the ascendency of the
monarchical and aristocratical elements of our polity. The government
would have been entirely in patrician hands. The House of Lords,
constantly drawing to itself the first abilities in the realm, would
have become the most august of senates, while the House of Commons would
have sunk almost to the rank of a vestry. From time to time undoubtedly
men of commanding genius and of aspi