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HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

CnAP.

XIX.

1692 .

speakers or steady voters. As often as the ministry was-changed, all this crowd of retainers would have been ejectedfrom office, and would have been succeeded by another setof members of Parliament who would probably have beenejected in their turn before they had half learned their business.Servility and corruption in the legislature, ignorance and in-capacity in all the departments of the executive administration,would have been the inevitable effects of such a system.

Still more noxious, if possible, would be the effects of asystem under which all the servants of the Crown, without ex-ception, should be excluded from the House of Commons.Aristotle has, in that treatise on government which is perhapsthe most judicious and instructive of all his writings, left us awarning against a class of laws artfully framed to delude thevulgar, democratic in seeming, but oligarchic in effect.* Hadhe had an opportunity of studying the history of the Englishconstitution, he might easily have enlarged his list of such laws.That men who are in the service and pay of the Crown oughtnol to sit in an assembly specially charged with the dutyof guarding the rights and interests of the community againstall aggression on the part of the Crown is a plausible and apopular doctrine. Yet it is certain that if those who, fivegenerations ago, held that doctrine, had been able to mouldthe constitution according to their wishes, the effect wouldhave been the depression of that branch of the legislature whichsprings from the people and is accountable to the people, andthe ascendency of the monarchical and aristocratical elementsof our polity. The government would have been entirely inpatrician hands. The House of Lords, constantly drawing toitself the first abilities in the realm, would have become themost august of senates, while the House of Commons wouldhave sunk almost to the rank of a vestry. From time to time* See the Politics, iv. 13.