they need not be exclusively so.  A Cabinet which included persons not members of the legislative assembly might still perform all useful duties.  Indeed the peers, who constitute a large element in modern Cabinets, are members, now-a-days, only of a subordinate assembly.  The House of Lords still exercises several useful functions; but the ruling influence—­the deciding faculty—­has passed to what, using the language of old times, we still call the lower house—­to an assembly which, though inferior as a dignified institution, is superior as an efficient institution.  A principal advantage of the House of Lords in the present age indeed consists in its thus acting as a reservoir of Cabinet Ministers.  Unless the composition of the House of Commons were improved, or unless the rules requiring Cabinet Ministers to be members of the legislature were relaxed, it would undoubtedly be difficult to find, without the lords, a sufficient supply of chief Ministers.  But the detail of the composition of a Cabinet, and the precise method of its choice, are not to the purpose now.  The first and cardinal consideration is the definition of a Cabinet.  We must not bewilder ourselves with the inseparable accidents until we know the necessary essence.  A Cabinet is a combining committee—­a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the State to the executive part of the State.  In its origin it belongs to the one, in its functions it belongs to the other.

The most curious point about the Cabinet is that so very little is known about it.  The meetings are not only secret in theory, but secret in reality.  By the present practice, no official minute in all ordinary cases is kept of them.  Even a private note is discouraged and disliked.  The House of Commons, even in its most inquisitive and turbulent moments, would scarcely permit a note of a Cabinet meeting to be read.  No Minister who respected the fundamental usages of political practice would attempt to read such a note.  The committee which unites the law-making power to the law-executing power—­which, by virtue of that combination, is, while it lasts and holds together, the most powerful body in the State—­is a committee wholly secret.  No description of it, at once graphic and authentic, has ever been given.  It is said to be sometimes like a rather disorderly board of directors, where many speak and few listen—­though no one knows. [Footnote:  It is said that at the end of the Cabinet which agreed to propose a fixed duty on corn, Lord Melbourne put his back to the door and said, “Now is it to lower the price of corn or isn’t it?  It is not much matter which we say, but mind, we must all say the same.”  This is the most graphic story of a Cabinet I ever heard, but I cannot vouch for its truth Lord Melbourne’s is a character about which men make stories.] But a Cabinet, though it is a committee of the legislative assembly, is a committee with a power which no assembly