agine, can doubt. We may distinguish and define its parts; but policy
is a unit and a whole. It acts by laws--by administrators; it requires
now one, now the other; unless it can easily move both it will be
impeded soon; unless it has an absolute command of both its work will
be imperfect. The interlaced character of human affairs requires a
single determining energy; a distinct force for each artificial
compartment will make but a motley patchwork, if it live long enough to
make anything. The excellence of the British Constitution is that it
has achieved this unity; that in it the sovereign power is single,
possible, and good.

The success is primarily due to the peculiar provision of the English
Constitution, which places the choice of the executive in the "people's
House"; but it could not have been thoroughly achieved except for two
parts, which I venture to call the "safety-valve" of the Constitution,
and the "regulator".

The safety-valve is the peculiar provision of the Constitution, of
which I spoke at great length in my essay on the House of Lords. The
head of the executive can overcome the resistance of the second chamber
by choosing new members of that chamber; if he do not find a majority,
he can make a majority. This is a safety-valve of the truest kind. It
enables the popular will--the will of which the executive is the
exponent, the will of which it is the appointee--to carry out within
the Constitution desires and conceptions which one branch of the
Constitution dislikes and resists. It lets forth a dangerous
accumulation of inhibited power, which might sweep this Constitution
before it, as like accumulations have often swept away like
Constitutions.

The regulator, as I venture to call it, of our single sovereignty is
the power of dissolving the otherwise sovereign chamber confided to the
chief executive. The defects of the popular branch of a legislature as
a sovereign have been expounded at length in a previous essay. Briefly,
they may be summed up in three accusations.

First. Caprice is the commonest and most formidable vice of a choosing
chamber. Wherever in our colonies Parliamentary government is
unsuccessful, or is alleged to be unsuccessful, this is the vice which
first impairs it. The assembly cannot be induced to maintain any
administration; it shifts its selection now from one Minister to
another Minister, and in consequence there is no government at all.

Secondly. The very remedy for