SUMMARY OF PROGRESS

381

lords, and she exercised her veto power once, the last time in history that it was used. In the case of Ashby vs. White and of the Aylesbury men against the returning officers for rejecting their votes, the house of commons failed in what was really an attempt to fix the qualifications for suffrage in parliamentary elections by their action alone rather than by statute.10 In 1711 an act was passed requiring a property qualification of members of the house of commons, £600 per year derived from land for county representatives, and £300 also from land for borough members. This act remained in force for more than a century.

Great progress has been made in these two reigns in the transition to cabinet government, but greater still remained to be made. At the death of Anne the cabinet as a definite body of office holders acting together and influencing on one side the policy of the government and on the other the action of parliament, had in practice taken the place of the privy council as the organ of advice and of the direction of policy in all the ordinary and almost all the extraordinary business of the state. It was no longer generally looked upon as an illicit, secret cabal or junto, dangerous to the power of parliament and to be kept under and if possible legislated out of existence. It was not yet seen how responsibility could be enforced upon its members except by impeachment, nor was the idea or consciousness of party government any more developed than that of ministerial responsibility, but it may be said that the existence of the cabinet as a recognized piece of government machinery had now been at least tacitly accepted. The sovereign was still regularly present at the deliberative meetings of the cabinet, and his will must have been on many occasions a compelling influence in the decision reached. On the other side, in the relation of cabinet to parliament, there was much still to be learned. There was as yet no prime minister of the modern sort, as recognized head of the cabinet 10 Robertson, Statutes, 408-420.

to whom the other members must be subordinate, and who especially stood for the whole before parliament and the nation; it was not yet understood that the members of the cabinet must be a unit on questions of policy; the coalition cabinet was as normal as any other and in practice more frequent, and even when the members were all from the same party it was not considered necessary that they should all stand together; a measure introduced by a member of the cabinet, and having the support of the ministry, was not yet a government measure involving the fate of the cabinet by its success or failure. As a consequence, the corporate responsibility of the cabinet to parliament was not yet understood, that when defeated in the house of commons the ministry as a whole and the party should lose its control of government, and a new ministry and a new party come into power. The country had to work through to this principle by the further experience of a whole generation, and this experience and not the earlier is really that by which the way to an understanding of cabinet government and ministerial responsibility was opened, though it was another generation still, and more, before the advantages of the new method of government were fully appreciated.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.-G. B. Adams, The Origin of the English Constitution, 1920. Sir W. R. Anson, The Law and Custom of the Constitution, 1907–9; The Cabinet in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, E. H. R. xxix, 56, 325, 1914. M. T. Blauvelt, The Development of Cabinet Government, 1902. E. I. Carlyle, Clarendon and the Privy Council, E. H. R. xxvii, 251. E. Jenks, Parliamentary England, 1903. H. B. Learned, The President's Cabinet, 1912. W. A. Shaw, The Beginnings of the National Debt, Owens Coll. Hist. Essays, 1907. H. W. V. Temperley, Inner and Outer Cabinet and Privy Council, E. H. R. xxvii, 682; Powers of the Privy Council in the Seventeenth Century, E H. R. xxviii, 127. E. R. Turner, The Development of the Cabinet, A. H. R. xviii, 751, xix, 27; Committees of Council and the Cabinet, A. H. R. xix, 772.

CHAPTER XVI

THE GROWTH OF THE CABINET

The accession of George I marks the beginning of an epoch as formative in the development of cabinet government as the epoch which begins with the accession of James I in the history of the general constitution. The cabinet in form and method of operation was ready for a great advance. The necessary conditions had been thoroughly prepared. The mechanical form was virtually fixed. Experience enough had been gained to serve as a guide and to insure that few opportunities offered in the new circumstances of the time would be missed. But it is exceedingly important to keep in mind the fact that still, and for a long time to come, the progress made had to be progress with no definite aim, with no conception, even by the most far-sighted statesmen who were leading the advance, of the result towards which they were reaching. This period of creative progress with no perception of the end may be said to close with the dismissal by George III, in 1783, of the ministry of Fox and North, and the appointment of the younger William Pitt as prime minister, in the teeth of a hostile majority in the house of commons. This date is too early, as we shall see, for a full understanding of the cabinet system, but it marks well enough the time at which the creative process is at an end. The result then reached only needs to be understood in all its bearings for the completion of the system.

The circumstance which introduced an epoch of peculiar progress, and made certain that it would go on uninterruptedly for fifty years, was the coming to the English throne of a foreign dynasty, the house of Hanover. George I was

not merely a German. He was well past fifty years of age when he became king of England. His habits and interests, his likes and dislikes, were firmly fixed. He would have found it very difficult to adapt himself to the strange conditions of his new kingdom even if he had earnestly tried to do so, and he had no wish to try. The great things in life to him, apart from certain personal pleasures, were the ha'penny intrigues among the petty states into which Germany was then divided. He desired the crown of England for the increased prestige, military strength, and money which it might bring him, but he really cared more to gain a little territory for his electorate, or a better military position in north Germany, than to defend the king's prerogative in England or to check a constitutional development which was destroying the royal initiative. There is another matter which seems an insignificant accident but which was really a prime factor in the result. The king knew no English. Scarcely one of the great ministers with whom he must do business during his reign knew German. Conversation even with Walpole had to be carried on in a Latin which was not very fluent on either side. Difficulties which George had in understanding English ways and methods, his lack of interest in learning the ins and outs of the constitution, needed only the added difficulty of talking things over freely with his ministers to make him quite willing to turn over to them the ordinary running of government without interference, and even the determination of policy in many cases where German politics were not directly concerned. It was the usual opportunity offered by a fainéant king, who in this case was a fainéant king less by nature than by circum

stances.

George II, who came to the throne in 1727, had more interest in England and a better knowledge of English affairs than his father, though still strongly attached to Hanover, but he was a man of very moderate abilities. The process of transferring the whole control of government policy to

THE FIRST PRIME MINISTER

385

the cabinet had gone on very rapidly in his father's time, and had been carried far. It would have required a decided effort to turn the current back, and George did not see how to do it. Sir Robert Walpole was firmly fixed in power, and continued so for a dozen years after he came to the throne. Besides this, George II was rather easily managed by his queen, though he did not suspect the fact. She was a devoted friend of Walpole's, and she also saw clearly that through his control of the house of commons the easiest way was opened of getting things done the root really from which the cabinet system grew. It must be added also that George II showed a rather surprising sense of obligation to respect the constitution, when he was convinced that a constitutional principle was involved. was involved. Altogether, then, his long reign of thirty-three years was a period indistinguishable from his father's, of hardly less rapid and of as uninterrupted growth of cabinet government both in methods of operation and in the understanding of the system.

But if the period was very favorable to the creation of cabinet government from the character of the kings who reigned, they did no more than furnish opportunity. Impulse and direction came from the great minister of the age, Sir Robert Walpole. The first in a The first in a long series of great English ministers who have found their field of action in the performance of a double function, the leadership or management of the house of commons and the exercise or direction of the national executive, Walpole was typical of his successors in the position which he created. He cannot be called a brilliant man as his rivals Bolingbroke and Carteret can be. Few of his successors have been brilliant men. His qualities were rather solid; his thinking was clear and thorough; his speeches won votes less by their eloquence than by their lucid and convincing argument. He was remarkable, at a time when political science and political economy had hardly begun to be and when careful observation of past experience was not common, for the number