power which it exercises over both. It is so conscious of the mighty force of its indirect powers that it no longer cares to claim the direct powers which it exercised in former times. There was a time when Parliament was directly consulted on questions of War and Peace. There was a time when Parliament claimed directly to appoint several of the chief officers of state(8). There were much later times when it was no unusual thing to declare a man in power to be a public enemy, or directly to address the Crown for his removal from office and from the royal presence. No such direct exercises of parliamentary power are needed now, because the whole machinery of government may be changed by the simple process of the House refusing to pass a measure on which the Minister has made up his mind to stake his official being. Into the history of the stages by which this most remarkable state of things has been brought about I do not intend here to enter. The code of our unwritten Constitution has, like all other English things, grown up bit by bit, and, for the most part, silently and without any acknowledged author. Yet some stages of the developement are easily pointed out, and they make important landmarks. The beginning may be placed in the reign of William the Third, when we first find anything at all like a _Ministry_ in the modern sense. Up to that time the servants of the Crown had been servants of the Crown, each man in the personal discharge of his own office. The holder of each office owed faithful service to the Crown, and he was withal responsible to the Law; but he stood in no special fellowship towards the holder of any other office. Provided he discharged his own duties, nothing hindered him from being the personal or political enemy of any of his fellow-servants. It was William who first saw that, if the King’s government was to be carried on, there must be at least a general agreement of opinions and aims among the King’s chief agents in his government(9). From this beginning a system has gradually grown up which binds the chief officers of the Crown to work together in at least outward harmony, to undertake the defence of one another, and on vital points to stand and fall together. Another important stage happened in much later times, when the King ceased to take a share in person in the deliberations of his Cabinet. And I may mark a change in language which has happened within my own memory, and which, like other changes of language, is certainly not without its meaning. We now familiarly speak, in Parliament and out of Parliament, of the body of Ministers actually in power, the body known to the Constitution but wholly unknown to the Law, by the name of “the Government.” We speak of “Mr. Gladstone’s Government” or “Mr. Disraeli’s Government.” I can myself remember the time when such a form of words was unknown, when “Government” still meant “Government by King, Lords, and Commons,” and