It is true, too, that at present some of the cleverest peers are not so ready as some others to agree with the Commons.  But it is not unnatural that persons of high rank and of great ability should be unwilling to bend to persons of lower rank, and of certainly not greater ability.  A few of such peers (for they are very few) might say, “We had rather not have our peerage if we are to buy it at the price of yielding”.  But a life peer who had fought his way up to the peers, would never think so.  Young men who are born to rank may risk it, not middle-aged or old men who have earned their rank.  A moderate number of life peers would almost always counsel moderation to the Lords, and would almost always be right in counselling it.

Recent discussions have also brought into curious prominence another part of the Constitution.  I said in this book that it would very much surprise people if they were only told how many things the Queen could do without consulting Parliament, and it certainly has so proved, for when the Queen abolished Purchase in the Army by an act of prerogative (after the Lords had rejected the bill for doing so), there was a great and general astonishment.

But this is nothing to what the Queen can by law do without consulting Parliament.  Not to mention other things, she could disband the army (by law she cannot engage more than a certain number of men, but she is not obliged to engage any men); she could dismiss all the officers, from the General Commanding-in-Chief downwards; she could dismiss all the sailors too; she could sell off all our ships of war and all our naval stores; she could make a peace by the sacrifice of Cornwall, and begin a war for the conquest of Brittany.  She could make every citizen in the United Kingdom, male or female, a peer; she could make every parish in the United Kingdom a “university”; she could dismiss most of the civil servants; she could pardon all offenders.  In a word, the Queen could by prerogative upset all the action of civil government within the Government, could disgrace the nation by a bad war or peace, and could, by disbanding our forces, whether land or sea, leave us defenceless against foreign nations.  Why do we not fear that she would do this, or any approach to it?

Because there are two checks—­one ancient and coarse, the other modern and delicate.  The first is the check of impeachment.  Any Minister who advised the Queen so to use her prerogative as to endanger the safety of the realm, might be impeached for high treason, and would be so.  Such a Minister would, in our technical law, be said to have levied, or aided to levy, “war against the Queen”.  This counsel to her so to use her prerogative would by the Judge be declared to be an act of violence against herself, and in that peculiar but effectual way the offender could be condemned and executed.  Against all gross excesses of the prerogative this is a sufficient protection.  But it would be no