minal and to execute another, to negotiate a
treaty on a particular basis or to send an expedition to a particular
place. They have merely to declare that they have ceased to trust the
Ministry, and to ask for a Ministry which they can trust.

It is by means of Ministries thus constituted, and thus changed, that
the English government has long been conducted in general conformity
with the deliberate sense of the House of Commons, and yet has been
wonderfully free from the vices which are characteristic of governments
administered by large, tumultuous and divided assemblies. A few
distinguished persons, agreeing in their general opinions, are the
confidential advisers at once of the Sovereign and of the Estates of the
Realm. In the closet they speak with the authority of men who stand high
in the estimation of the representatives of the people. In Parliament
they speak with the authority of men versed in great affairs and
acquainted with all the secrets of the State. Thus the Cabinet has
something of the popular character of a representative body; and the
representative body has something of the gravity of a cabinet.

Sometimes the state of parties is such that no set of men who can be
brought together possesses the full confidence and steady support of a
majority of the House of Commons. When this is the case, there must be
a weak Ministry; and there will probably be a rapid succession of weak
Ministries. At such times the House of Commons never fails to get into
a state which no person friendly to representative government can
contemplate without uneasiness, into a state which may enable us to form
some faint notion of the state of that House during the earlier years
of the reign of William. The notion is indeed but faint; for the weakest
Ministry has great power as a regulator of parliamentary proceedings;
and in the earlier years of the reign of William there was no Ministry
at all.

No writer has yet attempted to trace the progress of this institution,
an institution indispensable to the harmonious working of our other
institutions. The first Ministry was the work, partly of mere chance,
and partly of wisdom, not however of that highest wisdom which is
conversant with great principles of political philosophy, but of that
lower wisdom which meets daily exigencies by daily expedients. Neither
William nor the most enlightened of his advisers fully understood the
nature and importance of that noiseless revolution,--fo