to be the principal executive of the British Constitution, and the sovereign a cog in the mechanism.  There is, indeed, much excuse for the American legislators in the history of that time.  They took their idea of our Constitution from the time when they encountered it.  But in the so-called Government of Lord North, George III. was the Government.  Lord North was not only his appointee, but his agent.  The Minister carried on a war which he disapproved and hated, because it was a war which his sovereign approved and liked.  Inevitably, therefore, the American Convention believed the King, from whom they had suffered, to be the real executive, and not the Minister, from whom they had not suffered.

If we leave literary theory, and look to our actual old law, it is wonderful how much the sovereign can do.  A few years ago the Queen very wisely attempted to make life peers, and the House of Lords very unwisely, and contrary to its own best interests, refused to admit her claim.  They said her power had decayed into non-existence; she once had it, they allowed, but it had ceased by long disuse.  If any one will run over the pages of Comyn’s Digest or any other such book, title “Prerogative,” he will find the Queen has a hundred such powers which waver between reality and desuetude, and which would cause a protracted and very interesting legal argument if she tried to exercise them.  Some good lawyer ought to write a careful book to say which of these powers are really usable, and which are obsolete.  There is no authentic explicit information as to what the Queen can do, any more than of what she does.

In the bare superficial theory of free institutions this is undoubtedly a defect.  Every power in a popular Government ought to be known.  The whole notion of such a Government is that the political people—­the governing people—­rules as it thinks fit.  All the acts of every administration are to be canvassed by it; it is to watch if such acts seem good, and in some manner or other to interpose if they seem not good.  But it cannot judge if it is to be kept in ignorance; it cannot interpose if it does not know.  A secret prerogative is an anomaly—­perhaps the greatest of anomalies.  That secrecy is, however, essential to the utility of English royalty as it now is.  Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it.  When there is a select committee on the Queen, the charm of royalty will be gone.  Its mystery is its life.  We must not let in daylight upon magic.  We must not bring the Queen into the combat of politics, or she will cease to be reverenced by all combatants; she will become one combatant among many.  The existence of this secret power is, according to abstract theory, a defect in our constitutional polity, but it is a defect incident to a civilisation such as ours, where august and therefore unknown powers are needed, as well as known and serviceable powers.