First.  As to the caprice of Parliament in the choice of a Premier, who is the best person to check it?  Clearly the Premier himself.  He is the person most interested in maintaining his administration, and therefore the most likely person to use efficiently and dexterously the power by which it is to be maintained.  The intervention of an extrinsic king occasions a difficulty.  A capricious Parliament may always hope that his caprice may coincide with theirs.  In the days when George III. assailed his Governments, the Premier was habitually deprived of his due authority.  Intrigues were encouraged because it was always dubious whether the king-hated Minister would be permitted to appeal from the intriguers, and always a chance that the conspiring monarch might appoint one of the conspirators to be Premier in his room.  The caprice of Parliament is better checked when the faculty of dissolution is entrusted to its appointee, than when it is set apart in an outlying and an alien authority.

But, on the contrary, the party zeal and the self-seeking of Parliament are best checked by an authority which has no connection with Parliament or dependence upon it—­supposing that such authority is morally and intellectually equal to the performance of the entrusted function.  The Prime Minister obviously being the nominee of a party majority is likely to share its feeling, and is sure to be obliged to say that he shares it.  The actual contact with affairs is indeed likely to purify him from many prejudices, to tame him of many fanaticisms, to beat out of him many errors.  The present Conservative Government contains more than one member who regards his party as intellectually benighted; who either never speaks their peculiar dialect, or who speaks it condescendingly, and with an “aside”; who respects their accumulated prejudices as the “potential energies” on which he subsists, but who despises them while he lives by them.  Years ago Mr. Disraeli called Sir Robert Peel’s Ministry—­ the last Conservative Ministry that had real power—­“an organised hypocrisy,” so much did the ideas of its “head” differ from the sensations of its “tail”.  Probably he now comprehends—­if he did not always—­that the air of Downing Street brings certain ideas to those who live there, and that the hard, compact prejudices of opposition are soon melted and mitigated in the great gulf stream of affairs.  Lord Palmerston, too, was a typical example of a leader lulling, rather than arousing, assuaging rather than acerbating the minds of his followers.  But though the composing effect of close difficulties will commonly make a Premier cease to be an immoderate partisan, yet a partisan to some extent he must be, and a violent one he may be; and in that case he is not a good person to check the party.  When the leading sect (so to speak) in Parliament is doing what the nation do not like, an instant appeal ought to be registered and Parliament ought to be dissolved.  But a zealot of a Premier will not appeal; he will follow his formulae; he will believe he is doing good service when, perhaps, he is but pushing to unpopular consequences, the narrow maxims of an inchoate theory.  At such a minute a constitutional king—­such as Leopold the First was, and as Prince Albert might have been—­is invaluable; he can and will prevent Parliament from hurting the nation.