isters, on account of
the danger in which the Queen lay, though they admitted that they had
received no summons to attend,[156] there has been no instance of any
privy councillor attending without a summons; nor, except at the
accession of a new sovereign, of summonses being sent to any members of
the council except the actual ministers. The second argument was even
worse, as being still more sophistical. It might be true that no law nor
statute recognized the cabinet as a body distinct from the Privy
Council, but it was at least equally true that there was no one who was
ignorant of the distinction; that it was, in truth, one without which it
would be difficult to understand the organization or working of any
ministry. The indispensable function and privilege of a ministry is, to
deliberate in concert and in private on the measures to be taken for the
welfare of the state; but there could be little chance of concert, and
certainly none of privacy, if every one who has ever been sworn a member
of the Privy Council had a right to attend all its deliberations. Again,
to say that the King's prerogative, as exercised in the choice of his
advisers, is a thing so sacred that no abuse of it, or want of judgment
shown in its exercise, can warrant a complaint, is inconsistent with
every principle of constitutional government, and with every conceivable
idea of the privileges of Parliament. In fact, Parliament has claimed a
right to interfere in matters apparently touching more nearly the royal
prerogative, and it is only in the reign preceding the present reign
that hostile comments have been made in Parliament on the appointment of
a particular person as ambassador to a foreign power. Yet the post of
ambassador is one which might have been supposed to have been farther
removed from the supervision of Parliament than that of a minister, an
ambassador being in a special degree the personal representative of the
sovereign, and the sovereign therefore, having, it might be supposed, a
right to a most unfettered choice in such a matter.

Stripped of all technicalities, and even of all reference to the
manifest possibility of such a circumstance arising as that the
Chief-justice, if a member of a cabinet, may have a share in ordering
the institution of a prosecution which, as a judge, it may be his lot to
try, one consideration which is undeniable is, that a member of a
cabinet is of necessity, and by the very nature of his position in