influence--the deciding faculty--has passed
to what, using the language of old times, we still call the lower
house--to an assembly which, though inferior as a dignified
institution, is superior as an efficient institution. A principal
advantage of the House of Lords in the present age indeed consists in
its thus acting as a reservoir of Cabinet Ministers. Unless the
composition of the House of Commons were improved, or unless the rules
requiring Cabinet Ministers to be members of the legislature were
relaxed, it would undoubtedly be difficult to find, without the lords,
a sufficient supply of chief Ministers. But the detail of the
composition of a Cabinet, and the precise method of its choice, are not
to the purpose now. The first and cardinal consideration is the
definition of a Cabinet. We must not bewilder ourselves with the
inseparable accidents until we know the necessary essence. A Cabinet is
a combining committee--a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens,
the legislative part of the State to the executive part of the State.
In its origin it belongs to the one, in its functions it belongs to the
other.

The most curious point about the Cabinet is that so very little is
known about it. The meetings are not only secret in theory, but secret
in reality. By the present practice, no official minute in all ordinary
cases is kept of them. Even a private note is discouraged and disliked.
The House of Commons, even in its most inquisitive and turbulent
moments, would scarcely permit a note of a Cabinet meeting to be read.
No Minister who respected the fundamental usages of political practice
would attempt to read such a note. The committee which unites the
law-making power to the law-executing power--which, by virtue of that
combination, is, while it lasts and holds together, the most powerful
body in the State--is a committee wholly secret. No description of it,
at once graphic and authentic, has ever been given. It is said to be
sometimes like a rather disorderly board of directors, where many speak
and few listen--though no one knows.[1] But a Cabinet, though it is a
committee of the legislative assembly, is a committee with a power
which no assembly would--unless for historical accidents, and after
happy experience--have been persuaded to entrust to any committee. It
is a committee which can dissolve the assembly which appointed it; it
is a committee with a suspensive veto--a committee with a power of
appeal. Th