out popular influences. A real
supremacy belonged to the House as a whole; but the forces of which it
was compounded were not all derived from the people, and the
aristocratic power had found out the secret of asserting itself within
the walls of the popular chamber, in the dress and through the voices of
its members. Many persons of gravity and weight saw great danger in a
measure of change like the first Reform Act, which left it to the Lords
to assert themselves, thereafter, by an external force, instead of
through a share in the internal composition of a body so formidable. But
the result proved that they were sufficiently to exercise, through the
popular will and choice, the power which they had formerly put in action
without its sanction, though within its proper precinct and with its
title falsely inscribed.

The House of Commons is superior, and by far superior, in the force of
its political attributes, to any other single power in the State. But it
is watched; it is criticized; it is hemmed in and about by a multitude
of other forces: the force, first of all, of the House of Lords, the
force of opinion from day to day, particularly of the highly
anti-popular opinion of the leisured men of the metropolis, who, seated
close to the scene of action, wield an influence greatly in excess of
their just claims; the force of the classes and professions; the just
and useful force of the local authorities in their various orders and
places. Never was the great problem more securely solved, which
recognizes the necessity of a paramount power in the body politic to
enable it to move, but requires for it a depository such that it shall
be safe against invasion, and yet inhibited from aggression.

The old theories of a mixed government, and of the three powers, coming
down from the age of Cicero, when set by the side of the living British
Constitution, are cold, crude, and insufficient to a degree that makes
them deceptive. Take them, for example, as represented, fairly enough,
by Voltaire: the picture drawn by him is for us nothing but a puzzle:--

"Aux murs de Vestminster on voit paraitre ensemble
Trois pouvoirs etonnes du noeud qui les rassemble,
Les deputes du peuple, les grands, et le Roi,
Divises d' interet, reunis par la Loi."[15]

There is here lacking an amalgam, a reconciling power, what may be
called a clearing-house of political forces, which shall draw into
itself every thing, and shall balance and