LOCKE'S IDEAS IN AMERICA

361

But the fundamental ideas of Locke the sovereignty of the people, government resting on the consent of the governed, the legislature the supreme power but its power delegated by the people who may withdraw it, the executive not the director but the agent of the legislative were those expressed and acted upon by the puritans between 1642 and 1660 and built into the foundations of the American colonies.

The course of events in James's reign has been followed in rather full detail because it makes clearer than mere description in words can do the character of the crisis and what was at stake in it, the stage in which the constitution stood at the time, the serious danger to which it was exposed, and the necessity and character of the revolution which resulted.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.-W. C. Abbott, The Origin of English Political Parties, A. H. R. xxiv, 578, 1919. O. Airy, Charles II, 1904. F. Bate, The Declaration of Indulgence, 1672, 1908. A. V. Dicey, The Law of the Constitution, 1915. G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 1898. J. Pollock, The Popish Plot, 1903. W. A. Shaw, The Beginnings of the National Debt, Owens Coll. Hist. Essays, 1907.

CHAPTER XV

THE MAKING OF THE CABINET

The reign of William and Mary opened a new epoch in English constitutional history and one quite different from any in the past. The old struggle in the old form was ended. The old issue between the limited and the absolute monarchy, which had dominated more or less openly every epoch of English history since the beginning of the thirteenth century, was finally settled. The old absolutist theory, the Stuart interpretation of the constitution, was never again insisted upon by any English king. We shall come later to a time when a vigorous and for some years a successful effort was made by a king, George III, to recover power, but it will not be difficult to see that what he was trying to regain was not what was lost in the seventeenth century, but what was lost after 1688. It can even be said still further that questions involving the fundamental meaning of the constitution hardly arise again. It is two hundred years before a question of the kind that can with any semblance of truth be called fundamental becomes a leading one for the nation to decide. It is doubtful if even that question, the real position of the house of lords in the state, should be considered a case in point, for all that is fundamental in that question was virtually decided in 1688. The new epoch starts with the old issue settled, and its chief endeavor constitutionally is to learn how to apply that settlement more and more completely to all the details of government operation, and to devise effective machinery for carrying it out in practice. Its most striking characteristic is institution-making, and the chief institution made is beyond all question one of the most im

WHY NECESSARY

363

portant of history, we may perhaps in the end be justified in saying the most important, for its history is not yet finished. The new institution was the English cabinet, not meaning by that the cabinet as a mere institution, but the cabinet system of government: the cabinet as controlled by the modern doctrine and practice of ministerial responsibility.

To understand the beginning of the cabinet system we must go back to the restoration of 1660. The restoration was, as we have seen, a compromise by which the form of sovereignty remained with the king while the reality was transferred to parliament. If fully carried out in practice, this compromise would mean the direct supervision and control of all lines of government policy and executive action by the legislative assembly. Such an arrangement was new to all human experience and naturally there existed no machinery by which it could be carried out in practice, no institutional forms through which a legislature could exercise an executive authority which in theory it did not have. Constitutional machinery for the practical operation of the compromise must be devised and the origin and growth of this machinery is the origin and growth of the cabinet with the principle of ministerial responsibility to parliament. Or we may state the fact in another way: the English system of vesting the executive authority in a cabinet virtually chosen by the legislature and held under a close control by it, was the method finally devised to carry out in the practical operation of the government of the country the sovereignty of parliament which had resulted from the constitutional advance of the seventeenth century.

It would be absurd to suppose that the men of Charles II's reign, or any later reign, were conscious that here was a practical problem for them to solve. What they were conscious of at first was some little difficulty in harmonizing the king's policy and parliament's policy upon a common line of action, and such conscious efforts as were made, as in Sir

William Temple's plan for a reorganization of the privy council, were directed to creating a mediating, harmonizing body between these two great powers. These conscious efforts led to no result. So far as any progress was made under Charles II, it resulted from the efforts of a small body of ministers who were in the confidence of the king and at the same time able to influence the action of parliament. The earl of Clarendon, who was for a time one of these ministers, has described their methods in words which are especially interesting to us because they might be used almost without change to describe methods employed in Washington during the past thirty years in efforts to bring the influence of the president to bear on legislation. He says: "These ministers [Clarendon and Southampton] had every day conference with some select persons of the house of commons, who had always served the king, and upon that account had great interest in that assembly, and in regard of the experience they had and their good parts were hearkened to with reverence. And with those they consulted in what method to proceed in disposing the house, sometimes to propose, sometimes to consent to what should be most necessary to the public; and by them to assign parts to other men, whom they found disposed and willing to concur in what was to be desired: and all this without any noise, or bringing many together to design, which ever was and ever will be ingrateful to parliaments, and, however it may succeed for a little time, will in the end be attended with prejudice."

As a matter of fact, the king was still, and for a long time after, the real executive. He chose his own ministers and controlled their policy and did not concern himself with parliament's approval of them nor consistently with parliament's approval of his policy. On its side parliament naturally regarded the new methods with some suspicion, as evidence of intrigue in the king's interest, but it knew no way of exercising its power of final decision except by making a square issue with the king, nor of holding the king's servant

SLOW PROGRESS

365

responsible except by asserting a direct responsibility enforced by the old practice of impeachment.

The situation in this respect was not changed by the revolution of 1688. That revolution was not a decision as to particular forms or machinery. What was at stake once more were the principles which underlay all forms, and the whole nation showed that it was determined to maintain the settlement of 1660 so far as that was a settlement of the fundamental question of the supremacy of parliament. But we may be sure that if satisfactory constitutional machinery had been devised during the reign of Charles II for exercising that supremacy in practice, it would have been included in the settlement of 1689. But it had not been, and indeed in 1689 it was only the fundamental principle of parliamentary supremacy that was in any sense apprehended. Neither the range of its application to the operation of actual government, nor the method of its application, was yet understood, nor was the latter, which is the principle of ministerial responsibility applied to the cabinet, clearly understood for another century.

With the accession of William III this fundamental question at issue between king and parliament was settled, as has been said, never to be raised again. The characteristic feature of the new age was not a question of that kind, nor of the interpretation of the constitution, but it was progress upon the new task of devising machinery for carrying out in actual government the compromise settlement already reached. In workable machinery for this purpose, the age of William III made no great advance over that of Charles II. The mediating body still consisted of a small and informal group of ministers who enjoyed the confidence of the king and who were influential in parliamcnt. The king still retained a very decided control over the conduct of government, espe cially in foreign affairs, and he never dreamed of allowing parliament any voice, direct or indirect, in the choice of his ministers.