The monarch had, undoubtedly, the right to choose, but it was the right to choose between submitting to the captain of the ship and going over the side. He might appoint his cabinet, but he must appoint it from the men whom the political class offered; he could not stray into the world for a better selection; he could not follow the man of talents, or the man of integrity, into the less nobly born and less dexterously combined orders of society: _there_ stood the aristocratic recruits for his government, and unless he took them as they were, he was a general without an army. The advantages and disadvantages of this system were equally conspicuous. On the one view, ministers were not the creatures of place; they had personal characters to lose, their principles were publicly known, they were not dependent on the emoluments of office, nor thus had grown up through a succession of minor employments into places of distinction, the most ill-omened education for public men; they were not adventurers, they brought with them an accession of family influence, which raised them beyond the great temptation of _new_ men--that of courting the populace; and as the natural result of their birth, connections, and intercourse with men of a high class of society, they acted under a higher sense of dignity, and their public acts were more generally marked with a fearless, open, and generous stamp. On the other hand, the evils were of some moment in the monopoly of power in turning the State into a corporation, in the restriction on the rising ability of the humbler conditions of life, to the loss of doubtless much vigorous and original aid to the public councils, in the jealousy which that restriction naturally created in men who felt their talents, and in the consequent difficulties produced by the direction of those talents to party, as the only means of claiming justice for themselves. This was continually felt in the political tumults of England for the last fifty years of the century, and it was eminently experienced in Ireland, where every rising barrister instantly took the side of Opposition, and where even his attainment of office was felt as a stimulant and a bribe for new assaults on the Government: like buying off an invasion, the purchase was only a proclamation for a new march against the cabinet. The Grenvilles were of the political _caste_, and for two-thirds of a century there was no political good fortune in which a Grenville was not sure to share, if on the ministerial side--nor measure of opposition in which a Grenville was not sure to be busy, until the change came round, and the bustling patriot was transformed into the complacent placeman.