out the tempestuous years 1909-11, when the nation was aroused as it had not been in generations upon the issue of constitutional reform, and when every sort of project was warmly advocated and as warmly opposed, without exception every suggested program took for granted the perpetuation of monarchy as an integral part of the governmental system. In the general bombardment to which the hereditary House of Lords was subjected hereditary kingship wholly escaped. The reasons are numerous and complex. They arise in part, although by no means so largely as is sometimes imagined, from the fact that monarchy in England is a venerable institution, and the innate conservatism of the Englishman, while permitting him from time to time to regulate and modify it, restrains him from doing anything so revolutionary as to abolish it. That upon certain conspicuous occasions, as in the Cromwellian period, and again in 1688, kingship has owed its very life to the conservative instinct of the English people is well enough known to every student of history. But to-day, as ever, the institution rests upon a basis very much more substantial than a mere national predilection.

Monarchy remains impregnably intrenched because it fulfills specific ends which are universally recognized to be eminently worth while, if not indispensable. As a social, moral, and ceremonial agency, and as a visible symbol of the unity of the nation, and especially of the Empire, king and court occupy an immeasurable place in the life and thought of the people; and even within the domain of government, to employ the figure of Lowell, if the crown is no longer the motive power of the ship of state, it is the spar on which the sail is bent, and as such it is not only a useful but an essential part of the vessel. The entire governmental order of Great Britain hinges upon the cabinet system; and nowhere has that system been reduced to satisfactory operation without the presence of some central, but essentially detached, figure, whether a king or, as in France, a president with most of the attributes of kingship. It is because the English people have discovered that kingship is not necessarily incompatible with popular government that the monarchy has survived. If royalty had been found standing in the path of democratic progress, it is inconceivable that all the forces of tradition could have pulled it through the past seventy-five or eighty years. As it is, while half a century ago a small republican group was fond of urging that the monarchy was only a source 1 Government of England, I, 49.

of needless expense, to-day there is hardly a trace of antimonarchical sentiment in any section of society.

Before turning from this branch of our subject, let us consider what a scholarly English writer, Mr. Edward Jenks, has to say of the uses of kingship in his country. " In the first place,' he writes, "the king supplies the vital element of personal interest to the proceedings of government. It is far easier for the average man to realize a person than an institution. Even in the United Kingdom, only the educated few have any real appreciation of such abstract things as Parliament, the cabinet, or even the crown.' But the vast mass of the people are deeply interested in the king as a person, as is proved by the crowds which collect whenever there is a chance of seeing him; and it is possible that the majority of the people, even of the United Kingdom, to say nothing of the millions of India, believe that the government of the Empire is carried on by the king personally. He therefore supplies the personal and picturesque element which catches the popular imagination far more readily than constitutional arrangements, which cannot be heard or seen; and a king or queen who knows how to play this part skillfully, by a display of tact, graciousness, and benevolence, is rendering priceless services to the cause of contentment and good government. . . . Very closely allied to this personal character of the king is the great unofficial and social influence which he wields, and not he alone, but the queen, and, in a lesser degree, the other members of the royal family. Their influence in matters of religion, morality, benevolence, fashion, and even in art and literature, is immense. . . . How much good was done in this way by the late Queen Victoria, is a matter of common knowledge; it was one of the striking triumphs of her long reign. And, be it remembered, in such matters the monarch is in no way bound to follow, or even to seek, the advice of his ministers; for such matters lie outside the domain of politics.

A king who is fully informed of affairs becomes, in course of time, if he is an able man, an unrivaled storehouse of political experience. Ministers come and go; they are swayed, it is to be feared, by the interests of their party as well as by those of the state; they may have had to make, in order to obtain support, bargains which tie their hands; they have ambitions for the future, which they are loath to jeopardize. Not so the king. He is permanent; he is above all parties; he does not bargain for places and honors; he has nothing in the way of ambition to satisfy, except the noble ambition of securing his country's

welfare. So he can say to his ministers, with all the weight of his experience and position: Yes, I will, if you insist, do as you wish; but, I warn you, you are doing a rash thing. Do you remember so and so?' Only, the king must not give his warning in public; he must not seem to overrule his ministers. But a minister will, unless he is an exceptionally rash person, think many times before disregarding a warning from the king."1

Powers of the Crown: Sources and Development. It has been stated that the powers of the crown are numerous, vast, and of transcendent importance, and it has been explained that whereas they were once exercised fully and freely by the king himself, nowadays they rest in the hands of the ministers, who wield them with practically no restraint from the nominal ruler. It remains to point out how these powers arose, how they change from generation to generation and almost from year to year, and what they are at the present time. In the succeeding chapter, the nature of the authority that carries them into effect, i.e., the ministry, will be duly considered.

Speaking broadly, the powers of the crown are of dual origin: custom, or prerogative," and parliamentary definition or grant. Powers of a statutory character are, as a rule, definite and easily measurable. But those that flow from the prerogative are in many cases difficult to bring into clear view. The prerogative is defined by Dicey as "the residue of discretionary or arbitrary authority which at any time is legally left in the hands of the crown.' 2 The elements of it are to be ascertained, not from statutes but from precedents, and its sources, as enumerated by Anson, are (1) the residue of the executive power which the king in the early stages of English history possessed in all of the branches of government; (2) survivals of the power once accruing to the king as the feudal chief of the country; and (3) attributes with which the crown has been invested by legal theory, e.g., the attribute of perpetuity popularly expressed in the aphorism" the king never dies," and that of perfection of

1 Government of the British Empire, 37-40. The best brief discussions of the position of the sovereign in the governmental system are Lowell, Government of England, I, Chap. i; Moran, English Government, Chaps. ii-iii; Marriott, English Political Institutions, Chap. iii; and Low, Governance of England, Chaps. xiv-xv. More extended treatment of the subject will be found in Anson, Law and Custom of the Constitution, II, Pt. i, Chaps. i and iv; Todd, Parliamentary Government in England, I, Pt. ii; and Bagehot, English Constitution, Chaps. ii-iii. Mention may be made of N. Caudel, "Le souverain anglais," in Ann. des Sci. Polit., July, 1910, and J. Bardoux, "Le pouvoir politique de la couronne anglaise," in Rev. des Deux Mondes, May 15, 1911.

2 Law of the Constitution (7th ed.), 420.

judgment, similarly expressed in the saying "the king can do no wrong." The element in the prerogative which bulks largest is undoubtedly that which Anson mentions first, i.e., the power which the king carried over, in the teeth of the popularization of the governmental system, from days when the royal authority was not hedged about as it has been since the seventeenth century. It is further to be observed that many powers of the crown as they exist to-day represent original prerogative modified by parliamentary enactment; so that in many instances it becomes difficult to determine whether a given power exists by virtue of a statute, by which it is absolutely defined, or by virtue of an anterior prerogative, which may be capable of being stretched or interpreted more or less arbitrarily. No principle of the working constitution is more solidly established than that the prerogative of the crown may be defined, restricted, or extended by act of Parliament.

From what has been said it follows that the powers of the crown are in constant flux: they are always, and at the same time, being diminished and increased. Historically, they have been reduced in three principal ways. The first is great contractual agreements between king and people, best illustrated by Magna Carta and the Petition of Right. The second is prohibitive legislation, of such character as that which put an end to suspending or dispensing with laws, debasing the coinage, purveyance, preemption, and many other prerogatives. The third is simple disuse, illustrated by the lapse, since the Tudor period, of the power of the crown to add to the membership of the House of Commons by arbitrary enfranchisement of boroughs. On the other hand, the crown's powers have been steadily augmented both by custom and by legislation, particularly, in recent centuries, the latter. When, for example, Parliament adds an air service to the army, establishes a system of old age pensions, or authorizes a new tax, it imposes fresh duties of administration upon the crown and thereby perceptibly enlarges the volume of its power; or the grant may look to the exercise of legislative rather than executive functions, by means of the device of "statutory orders," to be presently explained. It is mainly on account of the enormous expansion of the functions and activities of government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, entailing steady accessions of power, that Lowell is able to conclude his discussion of this subject with the following striking words: "All told, the executive authority of the crown 1 Law and Custom of the Constitution, II, Pt. i, 3-5.

is, in the eye of the law, very wide, far wider than that of the chief magistrate in many countries, and well-nigh as extensive as that now possessed by the monarch in any government not an absolute despotism; and although the crown has no inherent legislative power except in conjunction with Parliament, it has been given by statute very large powers of subordinate legislation... Since the accession of the House of Hanover the new powers conferred upon the crown by statute have probably more than made up for the loss to the prerogative of powers which have either been restricted by the same process or become obsolete by disuse. By far the greater part of the prerogative, as it existed at that time, has remained legally vested in the crown, and can be exercised to-day." 1

Powers of the Crown Classified. - The powers of the crown to-day fall into two principal groups, according as they are executive or legislative. Nothing less than a chapter would serve to enumerate and explain the executive powers in all of their ramifications. It must serve, however, to say that the most important of them are: (1) appointment, directly or indirectly, of all national public officers, except some of the officials of the parliamentary chambers and a few unimportant hereditary dignitaries; (2) removal, upon occasion, of all appointed officers except judges, members of the Council of India, and the Comptroller and Auditor General; (3) execution of all laws and supervision of the executive machinery of the state throughout all of its branches; (4) expenditure of public money in accordance with appropriations voted by Parliament; (5) granting, in so far as not prohibited by statute, of charters of incorporation; (6) creating of all peers and conferring of all titles and honors; (7) coining money; (8) summoning of Convocation and, by reason of the king's headship of the Established Church, virtual appointment of the archbishops, bishops, and most of the deans and canons; (9) supreme command of the army and navy; (10) representing the nation in all of its dealings with foreign powers, including the appointment of all diplomatic and consular agents and the negotiation of treaties; 2 and (11) supervision or

1 Government of England, I, 26.

There is no question of the power of the crown to negotiate treaties; their ratification and execution is a different matter. Prior to the Great War, Parliament had little to do, directly, with treaty-making. It might refuse to vote supplies, or it might pass resolutions condemning the Government's policy. But unless, as in the case of the Anglo-German convention of 1890 ceding Heligoland and the Anglo-French convention of 1904 relating to Morocco and Egypt, a treaty contained an express provision for its submission to Parliament, ratification was usually by the Government, i.e., the ministry, itself, not by the two houses. Even