The highest patronage of a Prime Minister is, of course, a considerable power, though it is exercised under close and imperative restrictions--though it is far less than it seems to be when stated in theory, or looked at from a distance.
Walter Bagehot
The Public Record
Walter Bagehot was an English journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race. He is known for co-founding the National Review in 1855, and for his works The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873).
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The Cabinet, in a word, is a board of control chosen by the legislature, out of persons whom it trusts and knows, to rule the nation.
The particular mode in which the English Ministers are selected; the fiction that they are, in any political sense, the Queen's servants; the rule which limits the choice of the Cabinet to the members of the legislature--are accidents…
Its characteristic is that it should be chosen by the legislature out of persons agreeable to and trusted by the legislature.
The House of Lords still exercises several useful functions; but the ruling influence--the deciding faculty--has passed to what, using the language of old times, we still call the lower house--to an assembly which, though inferior as a…
A principal advantage of the House of Lords in the present age indeed consists in its thus acting as a reservoir of Cabinet Ministers.
The first and cardinal consideration is the definition of a Cabinet.
We must not bewilder ourselves with the inseparable accidents until we know the necessary essence.
A Cabinet is a combining committee--a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the State to the executive part of the State.
The most curious point about the Cabinet is that so very little is known about it.
The House of Commons, even in its most inquisitive and turbulent moments, would scarcely permit a note of a Cabinet meeting to be read.
No Minister who respected the fundamental usages of political practice would attempt to read such a note.
The committee which unites the law-making power to the law-executing power--which, by virtue of that combination, is, while it lasts and holds together, the most powerful body in the State--is a committee wholly secret.
No description of it, at once graphic and authentic, has ever been given.
It is a committee which can dissolve the assembly which appointed it; it is a committee with a suspensive veto--a committee with a power of appeal.
But neglecting such small and dubious exceptions, the Cabinet which was chosen by one House of Commons has an appeal to the next House of Commons.
The chief committee of the legislature has the power of dissolving the predominant part of that legislature--that which at a crisis is the supreme legislature.
The English system, therefore, is not an absorption of the executive power by the legislative power; it is a fusion of the two.
The first two Georges were men ignorant of English, and wholly unfit to guide and lead English society.
George III. had no social vices, but he had no social pleasures.
He was a family man, and a man of business, and sincerely preferred a leg of mutton and turnips after a good day's work, to the best fashion and the most exciting talk.
Careful observers have long perceived this, but it was made palpable to every one by the death of the Prince Consort.
Since then the Court has been always in a state of suspended animation, and for a time it was quite annihilated.
The queen bee was taken away, but the hive went on.
They have said, "that in old times the English Court took too much of the nation's money, and spent it ill; but now, when it could be trusted to spend well, it does not take enough of the nation's money.
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