an beings, however
well educated, has a strong tendency to become a mob; and a country of
which the Supreme Executive Council is a mob is surely in a perilous
situation.

Happily a way has been found out in which the House of Commons can
exercise a paramount influence over the executive government, without
assuming functions such as can never be well discharged by a body so
numerous and so variously composed. An institution which did not exist
in the times, of the Plantagenets, of the Tudors or of the Stuarts, an
institution not known to the law, an institution not mentioned in any
statute, an institution of which such writers as De Lolme and Blackstone
take no notice, began to exist a few years after the Revolution, grew
rapidly into importance, became firmly established, and is now almost
as essential a part of our polity as the Parliament itself. This
institution is the Ministry.

The Ministry is, in fact, a committee of leading members of the two
Houses. It is nominated by the Crown; but it consists exclusively of
statesmen whose opinions on the pressing questions of the time agree,
in the main, with the opinions of the majority of the House of
Commons. Among the members of this committee are distributed the great
departments of the administration. Each Minister conducts the ordinary
business of his own office without reference to his colleagues. But the
most important business of every office, and especially such business
as is likely to be the subject of discussion in Parliament, is brought
under the consideration of the whole Ministry. In Parliament the
Ministers are bound to act as one man on all questions relating to
the executive government. If one of them dissents from the rest on a
question too important to admit of compromise, it is his duty to retire.
While the Ministers retain the confidence of the parliamentary majority,
that majority supports them against opposition, and rejects every motion
which reflects on them or is likely to embarrass them. If they forfeit
that confidence, if the parliamentary majority is dissatisfied with
the way in which patronage is distributed, with the way in which the
prerogative of mercy is used, with the conduct of foreign affairs, with
the conduct of a war, the remedy is simple. It is not necessary that the
Commons should take on themselves the business of administration, that
they should request the Crown to make this man a bishop and that man
a judge, to pardon one cri