ve party?"

"I have no reason to suggest it," answered his son, "it stands written
in history. Under our more ancient Constitution the House of Laity came
pledged from its electorate to criticise, and to control (by the giving
or withholding of supply) the acts of a separate and administratively
independent body. Now Government is carried on by an administrative
body, which, though nominally dependent, has at its back a majority of
the elected pledged _not_ to criticise. And the difference between the
two systems is as the difference between darkness and light. That body
is now forcing the monarchy also into the same non-critical attitude, or
at least is securing that the criticism shall be impotent of result. And
I have the right, sir, to ask what are you doing to-day to preserve for
me the powers which you inherited?"

"To tell you the truth, my son," answered the King, "it is only lately
that I have begun trying to find out what those powers are. It seems a
strange confession to make after twenty-five years; but it is true. When
I came to the throne, at a moment of great political changes, I was
entirely uninstructed and quite naturally I made mistakes, letting
things go when I was told to. From that false position successive
ministries have never allowed me to escape; they have kept me (I have
only just found it out) as uninstructed as they possibly could. They
burden me with routine work, they busy my hands while starving my brain.
One of their little ways--done on the score of relieving me of
unnecessary trouble--has been to submit in large batches at intervals
important documents requiring my assent, smuggling them in under cover
of others. And when I find it out, they plead unavoidable delay and
urgency, as though it were quite an exception. But I tell you it has
been going on, oh, dear me, yes, for a long time now; and the General
has known of it as well as any of them! The other day I made one of my
secretaries go through the entries, and I find that in the last year I
signed sixty Acts of Parliament and about fifteen hundred other State
documents, besides mere commissions, titles, diplomas, and all that sort
of thing, and I tell you that I haven't a ghost of a notion of what more
than a dozen were about! They don't give me time to digest anything; and
you are quite right, it's a system!"

"Well," said his son, "at least they don't treat you much worse than
they do the people's representatives. It has become