I am not blaming this policy.  I am using it merely as an illustration.  I say that if we imagine this sort of action greatly exaggerated and greatly prolonged Parliamentary government becomes impossible.  If there are three parties, no two of which will steadily combine for mutual action, but of which the weakest gives a rapidly oscillating preference to the two others, the primary condition of a Cabinet polity is not satisfied.  We have not a Parliament fit to choose; we cannot rely on the selection of a sufficiently permanent executive, because there is no fixity in the thoughts and feelings of the choosers.

Under every species of Cabinet government, whether the royal or the unroyal, this defect can be cured in one way only.  The moderate people of every party must combine to support the Government which, on the whole, suits every party best.  This is the mode in which Lord Palmerston’s administration has been lately maintained; a Ministry in many ways defective, but more beneficially vigorous abroad, and more beneficially active at home, than the vast majority of English Ministries.  The moderate Conservatives and the moderate Radicals have maintained a steady Government by a sufficiently coherent union with the moderate Whigs.  Whether there is a king or no king, this perservative self-denial is the main force on which we must rely for the satisfactory continuance of a Parliamentary Government at this its period of greatest trial.  Will that moderation be aided or impaired by the addition of a sovereign?  Will it be more effectual under the royal sort of Ministerial Government, or will it be less effectual?

If the sovereign has a genius for discernment, the aid which he can give at such a crisis will be great.  He will select for his Minister, and if possible maintain as his Minister, the statesman upon whom the moderate party will ultimately fix their choice, but for whom at the outset it is blindly searching; being a man of sense, experience, and tact, he will discern which is the combination of equilibrium, which is the section with whom the milder members of the other sections will at last ally themselves.  Amid the shifting transitions of confused parties, it is probable that he will have many opportunities of exercising a selection.  It will rest with him to call either on A B to form an administration, or upon X Y, and either may have a chance of trial.  A disturbed state of parties is inconsistent with fixity, but it abounds in momentary tolerance.  Wanting something, but not knowing with precision what, parties will accept for a brief period anything, to see whether it may be that unknown something—­to see what it will do.  During the long succession of weak Governments which begins with the resignation of the Duke of Newcastle in 1762 and ends with the accession of Mr. Pitt in 1784, the vigorous will of George III. was an agency of the first magnitude.  If at a period of complex and protracted division of parties, such as are sure to occur often and last long in every enduring Parliamentary government, the extrinsic force of royal selection were always exercised discreetly, it would be a political benefit of incalculable value.