One of the most curious peculiarities of the English people is its dislike of the executive government.  We are not in this respect “un vrai peuple moderne,” like the Americans.  The Americans conceive of the executive as one of their appointed agents; when it intervenes in common life, it does so, they consider, in virtue of the mandate of the sovereign people, and there is no invasion or dereliction of freedom in that people interfering with itself.  The French, the Swiss, and all nations who breathe the full atmosphere of the nineteenth century, think so too.  The material necessities of this age require a strong executive; a nation destitute of it cannot be clean, or healthy, or vigorous, like a nation possessing it.  By definition, a nation calling itself free should have no jealousy of the executive, for freedom means that the nation, the political part of the nation, wields the executive.  But our history has reversed the English feeling:  our freedom is the result of centuries of resistance, more or less legal, or more or less illegal, more or less audacious, or more or less timid, to the executive government.  We have, accordingly, inherited the traditions of conflict, and preserve them in the fulness of victory.  We look on State action, not as our own action, but as alien action; as an imposed tyranny from without, not as the consummated result of our own organised wishes.  I remember at the census of 1851 hearing a very sensible old lady say that the “liberties of England were at an end”; if Government might be thus inquisitorial, if they might ask who slept in your house, or what your age was, what, she argued, might they not ask and what might they not do?

The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority.  The introduction of effectual policemen was not liked; I know people, old people, I admit, who to this day consider them an infringement of freedom, and an imitation of the gendarmes of France.  If the original policemen had been started with the present helmets, the result might have been dubious; there might have been a cry of military tyranny, and the inbred insubordination of the English people might have prevailed over the very modern love of perfect peace and order.  The old notion that the Government is an extrinsic agency still rules our imaginations, though it is no longer true, and though in calm and intellectual moments we well know it is not.  Nor is it merely our history which produces this effect; we might get over that; but the results of that history co-operate.  Our double Government so acts:  when we want to point the antipathy to the executive, we refer to the jealousy of the Crown, so deeply embedded in the very substance of constitutional authority; so many people are loth to admit the Queen, in spite of law and fact, to be the people’s appointee and agent, that it is a good rhetorical emphasis to speak of her prerogative as something non-popular, and therefore to be distrusted.  By the very nature of our government our executive cannot be liked and trusted as the Swiss or the American is liked and trusted.