I think every one must admit that this is not an arrangement which seems right on the face of it.  Treaties are quite as important as most laws, and to require the elaborate assent of representative assemblies to every word of the law, and not to consult them even as to the essence of the treaty, is prima facie ludicrous.  In the older forms of the English Constitution, this may have been quite right; the power was then really lodged in the Crown, and because Parliament met very seldom, and for other reasons, it was then necessary that, on a multitude of points, the Crown should have much more power than is amply sufficient for it at present.  But now the real power is not in the Sovereign, it is in the Prime Minister and in the Cabinet—­that is, in the hands of a committee appointed by Parliament, and of the chairman of that committee.  Now, beforehand, no one would have ventured to suggest that a committee of Parliament on foreign relations should be able to commit the country to the greatest international obligations without consulting either Parliament or the country.  No other select committee has any comparable power; and considering how carefully we have fettered and limited the powers of all other subordinate authorities, our allowing so much discretionary power on matters peculiarly dangerous and peculiarly delicate to rest in the sole charge of one secret committee is exceedingly strange.  No doubt it may be beneficial; many seeming anomalies are so, but at first sight it does not look right.

I confess that I should see no advantage in it if our two Chambers were sufficiently homogeneous and sufficiently harmonious.  On the contrary, if those two Chambers were as they ought to be, I should believe it to be a great defect.  If the administration had in both Houses a majority—­not a mechanical majority ready to accept anything, but a fair and reasonable one, predisposed to think the Government right, but not ready to find it to be so in the face of facts and in opposition to whatever might occur; if a good Government were thus placed, I should think it decidedly better that the agreements of the administration with foreign powers should be submitted to Parliament.  They would then receive that which is best for all arrangements of business, an understanding and sympathising criticism, but still a criticism.  The majority of the legislature, being well disposed to the Government, would not “find” against it except it had really committed some big and plain mistake.  But if the Government had made such a mistake, certainly the majority of the legislature would find against it.  In a country fit for Parliamentary institutions, the partisanship of members of the legislature never comes in manifest opposition to the plain interest of the nation; if it did, the nation being (as are all nations capable of Parliamentary institutions) constantly attentive to public affairs, would inflict on them the maximum Parliamentary penalty at the next