There is great danger, too, that the judgment of the sovereign may be prejudiced.  For more than forty years the personal antipathies of George III. materially impaired successive administrations.  Almost at the beginning of his career he discarded Lord Chatham:  almost at the end he would not permit Mr. Pitt to coalesce with Mr. Fox.  He always preferred mediocrity; he generally disliked high ability; he always disliked great ideas.  If constitutional monarchs be ordinary men of restricted experience and common capacity (and we have no right to suppose that by miracle they will be more), the judgment of the sovereign will often be worse than the judgment of the party, and he will be very subject to the chronic danger of preferring a respectful common-place man, such as Addington, to an independent first-rate man, such as Pitt.

We shall arrive at the same sort of mixed conclusion if we examine the choice of a Premier under both systems in the critical case of Cabinet government—­the case of three parties.  This is the case in which that species of government is most sure to exhibit its defects, and least likely to exhibit its merits.  The defining characteristic of that government is the choice of the executive ruler by the legislative assembly; but when there are three parties a satisfactory choice is impossible.  A really good selection is a selection by a large majority which trusts those it chooses, but when there are three parties there is no such trust.  The numerically weakest has the casting vote—­it can determine which candidate shall be chosen.  But it does so under a penalty.  It forfeits the right of voting for its own candidate.  It settles which of other people’s favourites shall be chosen, on condition of abandoning its own favourite.  A choice based on such self-denial can never be a firm choice—­it is a choice at any moment liable to be revoked.  The events of 1858, though not a perfect illustration of what I mean, are a sufficient illustration.  The Radical party, acting apart from the moderate Liberal party, kept Lord Derby in power.  The ultra-movement party thought it expedient to combine with the non-movement party.  As one of them coarsely but clearly put it, “We get more of our way under these men than under the other men”; he meant that, in his judgment, the Tories would be more obedient to the Radicals than the Whigs.  But it is obvious that a union of opposites so marked could not be durable.  The Radicals bought it by choosing the men whose principles were most adverse to them; the Conservatives bought it by agreeing to measures whose scope was most adverse to them.  After a short interval the Radicals returned to their natural alliance and their natural discontent with the moderate Whigs.  They used their determining vote first for a Government of one opinion and then for a Government of the contrary opinion.