better
in the Premier than in the sovereign; and by the late practice of our
constitution, its use is yearly ebbing from the sovereign, and yearly
centring in the Premier. The Queen can hardly now refuse a defeated
Minister the chance of a dissolution, any more than she can dissolve in
the time of an undefeated one, and without his consent.

We shall find the case much the same with the safety-valve, as I have
called it, of our Constitution. A good, capable, hereditary monarch
would exercise it better than a Premier, but a Premier could manage it
well enough; and a monarch capable of doing better will be born only
once in a century, whereas monarchs likely to do worse will be born
every day.

There are two modes in which the power of our executive to create
Peers--to nominate, that is, additional members of our upper and
revising chamber--now acts: one constant, habitual, though not
adequately noticed by the popular mind as it goes on; and the other
possible and terrific, scarcely ever really exercised, but always by
its reserved magic maintaining a great and a restraining influence. The
Crown creates peers, a few year by year, and thus modifies continually
the characteristic feeling of the House of Lords. I have heard people
say, who ought to know, that the ENGLISH peerage (the only one upon
which unhappily the power of new creation now acts) is now more Whig
than Tory. Thirty years ago the majority was indisputably the other
way. Owing to very curious circumstances English parties have not
alternated in power, as a good deal of speculation predicts they would,
and a good deal of current language assumes they have. The Whig party
were in office some seventy years (with very small breaks) from the
death of Queen Anne to the coalition between Lord North and Mr. Fox;
then the Tories (with only such breaks), were in power for nearly fifty
years, till 1832; and since, the Whig party has always, with very
trifling intervals, been predominant. Consequently, each
continuously-governing party has had the means of modifying the Upper
House to suit its views. The profuse Tory creations of half a century
had made the House of Lords bigotedly Tory before the first Reform Act,
but it is wonderfully mitigated now. The Irish Peers and Scotch
Peers--being nominated by an almost unaltered constituency, and
representing the feelings of the majority of that constituency only (no
minority having any voice)--present an unchangeable Tory