mission to the growing change of public opinion in favor of those
claims (the Roman Catholic claims), and the real sentiments of certain
members of the government, it had been resolved upon, as a principle,
that the discussion of this question should be left free from all
interference on the part of the government, and that every member of
that government should in it be left to the free and unbiassed
suggestions of his own conscientious discretion."

It was an arrangement which secured the Prime-minister the co-operation
of Lord Castlereagh himself, and eventually of Mr. Canning; but it
failed to propitiate the Opposition, the leader of which in the House of
Commons, Mr. Ponsonby, turned it into open ridicule, affirming that
"nothing could be more absurd than a cabinet professing to have no
opinion on such an important subject." And it must be confessed that Mr.
Ponsonby's language on the subject seems the language of common-sense.
So far from the importance of a question justifying such an arrangement,
that importance appears rather to increase, if possible, the necessity
for absolute unanimity in the administration than to diminish it; and on
a grave and momentous subject to leave each member of a ministry free to
pronounce a separate and different judgment, so that one may resist what
his colleague advocates, is to abdicate the functions of government
altogether. To permit such liberty was either a proof that the ministry
was weak altogether--which it was not--or that its conduct on this
question was weak. In either case, it was a mischievous precedent that
was thus set;[174] and the fact that it has since been followed in more
than one instance, is so far from being any justification of it, that it
rather supplies an additional reason for condemning it, as being the
cause of wider mischief than if it had been confined to one single
question, or had influenced the conduct of one cabinet only. It has
often been said that the name "cabinet" is unknown to the law, and that
what we call the cabinet is, in fact, only a committee of the Privy
Council. As a statement of law the assertion may be correct, but it is
certain that for more than a century and a half the constitution has
adopted the principle that the cabinet consists of the holders of a
certain, to some extent a fluctuating, number of the principal state
officers; and, recognizing the responsibility of all for the actions of
each member of it, does by that recogn