The fact asserted is past dispute. Our institutions are based upon fictions. The Prime Minister, the real head of the English Executive, is an official unknown to the law. The Queen, who is the only constitutional head of the Executive, is not the real head of the Government. The Crown possesses a veto on all legislation and never exercises it; the House of Lords might, if the House pleased, reject year by year every Bill sent up to it by the House of Commons; yet such a course of action is never actually pursued and could not be dreamt of except by a madman. There is no advantage in exemplifying further a condition of things which must be known to every person who has the slightest acquaintance with either the law, or the custom, of the constitution. But the inference which Gladstonian apologists draw from the existence of anomalies is, in the strict sense of the word, preposterous. On the face of the matter it is a strange way of reasoning to say that because the constitution is filled with odd arrangements which no man can justify in theory, you therefore, when designing a new constitution, should take no care to make your arrangements consistent and harmonious. But the Gladstonian error goes a good deal deeper than is at first sight apparent. The anomalies or the fictions of the constitution are in reality adaptations, often awkward enough in themselves, of some old institution, and are preserved because, though they look strange, they are found to work well. Thus the King of England was at one time the actual sovereign of the State, or at any rate the most important member of the sovereign power, and the Ministers were in reality, what they are still in name, the King's servants. The powers of the Crown have been greatly diminished, and have been transferred in effect to the Houses of Parliament, or rather to the House of Commons, and the Ministers taken from the Houses are in fact, though not in name, servants of Parliament. This arrangement leaves an undefined and undefinable amount of authority to the Crown. It is not an arrangement which any man would have planned beforehand; but it is kept up, not because it is an anomaly, but because it has, as a matter of experience, turned out convenient. What even plausible argument can thence be drawn to show that a new constitutional arrangement, on the face of it awkward and inconvenient, will for some unknown reason turn out workable and beneficial? He who reasons thus, if reasoning it can be called, might as well argue that because an old shoe which has gradually been worn to the form of the foot is comfortable, therefore a shoemaker need not care to make a new shoe fit.