aper.

II.

The House of Commons has inquired into most things, but has never had a
committee on "the Queen". There is no authentic blue-book to say what
she does. Such an investigation cannot take place; but if it could, it
would probably save her much vexatious routine, and many toilsome and
unnecessary hours.

The popular theory of the English Constitution involves two errors as
to the sovereign. First, in its oldest form at least, it considers him
as an "Estate of the Realm," a separate co-ordinate authority with the
House of Lords and the House of Commons. This and much else the
sovereign once was, but this he is no longer. That authority could only
be exercised by a monarch with a legislative veto. He should be able to
reject bills, if not as the House of Commons rejects them, at least as
the House of Peers rejects them. But the Queen has no such veto. She
must sign her own death-warrant if the two Houses unanimously send it
up to her. It is a fiction of the past to ascribe to her legislative
power. She has long ceased to have any. Secondly, the ancient theory
holds that the Queen is the executive. The American Constitution was
made upon a most careful argument, and most of that argument assumes
the king to be the administrator of the English Constitution, and an
unhereditary substitute for him--viz., a president--to be peremptorily
necessary. Living across the Atlantic, and misled by accepted
doctrines, the acute framers of the Federal Constitution, even after
the keenest attention, did not perceive the Prime Minister to be the
principal executive of the British Constitution, and the sovereign a
cog in the mechanism. There is, indeed, much excuse for the American
legislators in the history of that time. They took their idea of our
Constitution from the time when they encountered it. But in the
so-called Government of Lord North, George III. was the Government.
Lord North was not only his appointee, but his agent. The Minister
carried on a war which he disapproved and hated, because it was a war
which his sovereign approved and liked. Inevitably, therefore, the
American Convention believed the King, from whom they had suffered, to
be the real executive, and not the Minister, from whom they had not
suffered.

If we leave literary theory, and look to our actual old law, it is
wonderful how much the sovereign can do. A few years ago the Queen very
wisely attempted to make life peers, and the House of Lords ver