always dubious
whether the king-hated Minister would be permitted to appeal from the
intriguers, and always a chance that the conspiring monarch might
appoint one of the conspirators to be Premier in his room. The caprice
of Parliament is better checked when the faculty of dissolution is
entrusted to its appointee, than when it is set apart in an outlying
and an alien authority.

But, on the contrary, the party zeal and the self-seeking of Parliament
are best checked by an authority which has no connection with
Parliament or dependence upon it--supposing that such authority is
morally and intellectually equal to the performance of the entrusted
function. The Prime Minister obviously being the nominee of a party
majority is likely to share its feeling, and is sure to be obliged to
say that he shares it. The actual contact with affairs is indeed likely
to purify him from many prejudices, to tame him of many fanaticisms, to
beat out of him many errors. The present Conservative Government
contains more than one member who regards his party as intellectually
benighted; who either never speaks their peculiar dialect, or who
speaks it condescendingly, and with an "aside"; who respects their
accumulated prejudices as the "potential energies" on which he
subsists, but who despises them while he lives by them. Years ago Mr.
Disraeli called Sir Robert Peel's Ministry--the last Conservative
Ministry that had real power--"an organised hypocrisy," so much did the
ideas of its "head" differ from the sensations of its "tail". Probably
he now comprehends--if he did not always--that the air of Downing
Street brings certain ideas to those who live there, and that the hard,
compact prejudices of opposition are soon melted and mitigated in the
great gulf stream of affairs. Lord Palmerston, too, was a typical
example of a leader lulling, rather than arousing, assuaging rather
than acerbating the minds of his followers. But though the composing
effect of close difficulties will commonly make a Premier cease to be
an immoderate partisan, yet a partisan to some extent he must be, and a
violent one he may be; and in that case he is not a good person to
check the party. When the leading sect (so to speak) in Parliament is
doing what the nation do not like, an instant appeal ought to be
registered and Parliament ought to be dissolved. But a zealot of a
Premier will not appeal; he will follow his formulae; he will believe
he is doing good service