country a Federal Commonwealth. And no reasonable person will seek to disturb an institution which, like other English institutions, has grown up because it was wanted(51). Our unwritten Constitution, which gives us an hereditary Sovereign, but which requires his government to be carried on by Ministers who are practically chosen by the House of Commons, does in effect attain the same objects which were sought to be attained by the elective kingship of our forefathers. Our system gives the State a personal chief, a personal embodiment of the national being, which draws to itself those feelings of personal homage and personal duty which a large class of mankind find it hard to look upon as due to the more abstract ideas of Law and Commonwealth. And, when the duties of constitutional royalty are discharged as our own experience tells us that they may be discharged, the feeling awakened is more than a mere sentiment; it is a rational feeling of genuine personal respect. But widely as the hereditary kingship of our latest times differs in outward form from the hereditary kingship of our earliest times, the two have points of likeness which are not shared by kingship in the form which it took in the ages between the two. In our earliest and in our latest system, the King exists for the sake of the people; in the intermediate times it sometimes seemed that the people existed for the sake of the King. In our earliest and in our latest system, the King is clothed with an office, the duties of which are to be discharged for the common good of all. In the intermediate times it sometimes seemed as if the King had been made master of a possession which was to be enjoyed for his personal pleasure and profit. In the intermediate times we constantly hear of the rights and powers of the Crown as something distinct from, and almost hostile to, the common rights of the people. In our earliest and in our latest times, the rights of the Crown and the rights of the people are the same, for it is allowed that the powers of the Crown are to be exercised for the welfare of the people by the advice and consent of the people or their representatives. Without indulging in any Utopian dreams, without picturing to ourselves the England of a thousand years back as an earthly paradise, the voice of sober history does assuredly teach us that those distant times have really much in common with our own, much in which we are really nearer to them than to times which, in a mere reckoning of years, are far less distant from us. Thus it is that the cycle has come round, that the days of foreign rule have been wiped out, and that England is England once again. Our present Sovereign reigns by as good a right as Ælfred or Harold, for she reigns by the same right by which they reigned, by the will of the people, embodied in the Act of Parliament which made the crown of Ælfred and Harold hereditary in her ancestress. And, reigning by the same right by which