s not one to which the Regent felt any repugnance, since, in 1827,
when Lord Liverpool's illness again left the Treasury vacant, he, being
then on the throne as George IV., proposed to the Duke of Wellington to
desire the remaining members of the administration themselves to select
a chief under whom they would be willing to continue in his service; but
the Duke told him that the plan of allowing them to choose their own
leader would be most derogatory to his position; that the choice of the
Prime-minister was an act which ought to be entirely his own, for that,
in fact under the British constitution, it was the only personal act of
government which the King of Great Britain had to perform.[171] Though
not generally a great authority on constitutional points, we apprehend
that the Duke was clearly correct in this view, which, indeed, has been
so invariably carried out in practice, that the King's suggestion would
not have deserved mention had it not been a king's. So far from it
belonging to any individual subject or to any party to name the
Prime-minister, to do so is even beyond the province of the Parliament.
Parliament decides whether it will give its confidence to an
administration of one party or the other; but not only has no vote ever
been given on the question whether one member of the dominant party be
fitter or not than another to be its head, but we do not remember a
single instance of any member of either House expressing an opinion on
the subject in his place in Parliament. To do so would be felt by every
member of experience to be an infringement on the prerogative of his
sovereign; and it may be added that a contrary practice would certainly
open the door to intrigue, or, what would be equally bad, a suspicion of
intrigue, and would thus inevitably diminish the weight which even the
Opposition desire to see a Prime-minister possess both in Parliament and
in the country.

Notes:

[Footnote 148: It is somewhat remarkable that Lord Macaulay, in his
endeavors to estimate the population in 1685, takes no notice of any of
these details mentioned by Mr. Abbott.]

[Footnote 149: The details of this census of 1801 are given in a note in
the preceding chapter (see page 185), from which it appears that the
entire population of the United Kingdom was in that year 16,395,870. Sir
A. Alison, in different chapters of the second part of his "History of
Europe," gives returns of subsequent censuses, from the last of wh