fastened to plank, she looked away over the heads of the people and her eyes rested for a moment on the great clay figure of Liberty erected on August 10, 1790. Perhaps she thought of the shimmering vision which had led her to this pass, contrasting it with the earthly idol: we do not know, but with an exquisite irony inimitable in this tongue she exclaimed, and we can see the sad impossible smile of one who still believed in Liberty as an Ideal Good and who still despised the brute people 'O Liberté ! comme on t'a jouée !'

Roland heard the news on the following Friday and fell senseless. When he recovered he ran a sword through his heart. To Buzot, too, the news came on the same Friday, it crushed the man in him. He wandered about as a refugee for the remaining months of his life, and almost a year later his body was found in a wood half eaten by wolves.

ART. VIII.-ENGLISH PUBLIC LIFE.

1. The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. By WILLIAM FLAVELLE MONYPENNY. Vol. i. 1804-1837. Murray. 1910.

2. The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell. By R. BARRY O'BRIEN. Popular Edition. Nelson. 1910.

3. Gathorne Hardy, First Earl of Cranbrook. A Memoir. Edited by the Hon. ALFRED E. GATHORNE-HARDY. 2 vols. Longmans. 1910.

4. Thomas George, Earl of Northbrook, G.C.S.I. A Memoir. By BERNARD MALLET. Longmans. 1908.

THE appetite of Englishmen for biographies of their notable fellow-countrymen seems almost insatiable. As a rule hardly has an Englishman of distinction been laid to rest than the work of writing his memoir is begun. Even artists and authors, whose interest might be supposed to lie rather in their written and graven achievements than in the incidents of their careers, find biographers and a public to read their histories. What fascination, for example, has been found by hundreds in the externally uneventful lives of Burne-Jones, Whistler, Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, FitzGerald or even Leslie Stephen! For we feel a craving to know how the men that have influenced their generation passed their lives. Still more are we drawn to memoirs of our statesmen. Those not quite in the front rank such as Childers, Derby, Dufferin, Fawcett, Forster, Granville, Iddesleigh, Lytton, Selborne, Sherbrooke and W. H. Smith have already found that niche in the temple of fame which the written memoir gives, whilst accounts of the greatest such as Gladstone or Queen Victoria count their readers by the million.

This interest in biography, and especially political biography, is no new phenomenon in England. In the eighteenth century, when politics were more of a family affair than to-day, and occasionally successful efforts were made to exclude the proceedings in Parliament from public knowledge, it was apparent. An account of Chatham's life was compiled immediately after his death by Almon, and Wilkes, the political bravo, was commemorated by the same enterprising bookseller, while even a politician of Barrington's diligent obscurity found a biographer; articles in the Gentleman's Magazine' and the Annual

Register to some extent satisfied the same taste, and Hervey, Horace Walpole, and Wraxall catered nobly for the curiosity of their contemporaries and successors as to the lives of eighteenth-century politicians. This persistent national interest in the careers of our leading men in every walk of life is partly accounted for by our belief in the individual as the chief factor in our developement. Whereas French historians are more prone to study general tendencies in their evolution as a nation, we fasten our attention on personalities, and are little interested in the psychology of the crowd. We need but think of the contrast between a Montesquieu or a Taine on the one hand and our own Carlyle and Macaulay on the other; Gibbon remains almost a solitary example among our great historians of the French spirit.

But in the case of our politicians this vigilant interest is no idle outcome of our national temperament, it is a vital accompaniment of our English constitution. Proud as we are of this constitution and of its faculty for harmonious adaptation to changing circumstances, we have never regarded it as a machine complete in itself, but rather as an instrument depending for its usefulness on the service to which it is put by the individuals who for the moment are trusted to handle it for the purposes of government. Its very flexibility causes it to bend to the idiosyncrasies of our statesmen, and its want of legal fixity makes the character of the passing politician more important than in countries where the constitution is more rigid. Such a constitution has its own peculiar dangers, dependent as it is for its developement on the characteristics of its chief administrators for the moment. Thus changes in our customs of government are apt to depend on individual statesmen's interpretation of our unwritten constitution rather than on any revolutionary or avowed modification of its form. Constitutional changes of far-reaching effect have often been due to passing circumstances and the party need of the politicians responsible for them. The real significance of such changes is often overlooked by contemporaries, who are mainly interested in the personal issues; and although such changes often exercise a great influence on our constitutional theory and practice, there is a danger that their full bearing may escape notice at the moment. It is to guard against this danger of encroachment on our liberties that vigilant observation, sharpened by this wealth of political biography, is necessary.

Interesting examples of these gradual constitutional changes, wrought largely by personal and apparently temporary causes, may be traced in the course of the biographies noted at the

head of this article, which between them cover almost a century of our history. The alteration of the ministry's relations both to the king and to Parliament during this period is an important case in point. The constitutional doctrine that ministers are appointed by the Crown and act solely as the servants of the Crown has never varied in theory up to this day. During the eighteenth century, moreover, the king not only could but often did appoint or dismiss ministers on his own mere motion; and the view of cabinet responsibility on which this practice was based lasted unimpaired till the reign of William IV. But the occasion on which Disraeli took his first active part in political intrigue, when William IV arbitrarily dismissed his Whig ministry and attempted to force a Peel and Wellington ministry on the country, proved to be the last opportunity for such an exercise of prerogative by an English king. In this case the king had miscalculated the support he would obtain for his action, and thereby made manifest that the real basis of such power is the tacit sanction of the people : once this was revealed, owing to the change in representation due to the Reform Act, similar action became impossible, and the king's part in forming cabinets was shown to be merely as the instrument of the people's will. On the other hand the absolute responsibility of the cabinet to Parliament has become far more rigid. In the eighteenth century and for a large part of the nineteenth a general approbation of the ministry by the House of Commons was considered sufficient, while defeats on comparatively important details of policy were not held to imply that the ministry had lost the confidence of Parliament: indeed it lay chiefly with the cabinet itself to decide what measure of confidence it regarded as desirable for its own existence. But recently the acquiescence by the House of Commons in almost every detail of ministerial policy has been considered essential, and we have seen ministries resigning on comparatively unimportant matters, such as the small Budget points on which Gladstone's ministry fell in 1885, and the cordite question which gave an excuse for Lord Rosebery's resignation ten years later. In both these instances the determining motives for resignation at the time were undoubtedly disunion and a sense of weakness in the ministry; but the effect of these precedents will assuredly be to make continuance of office under similar rebuffs almost impossible.

For side by side with such personal causes, and partly as a result of them, has arisen a deeper cause for this increased sensitiveness of cabinets to votes of the House of Commons. This is, paradoxically enough, the vastly increased power of

the Cabinet over the House of Commons, a power which depends on almost complete subservience from the House, and to which even a slight act of rebellion like an adverse vote on a trivial matter must necessarily prove fatal. In the eighteenth century the House of Commons, while leaving to ministers a general control over policy, retained considerable independence in matters of legislation, and even in isolated details of administration. But now the cabinet as a body controls nearly the whole of the legislation passed by Parliament as well as all the details of administration; the consequence is that if the House of Commons disapproves of any cabinet proposal or action, however unimportant, the cabinet is apt to feel bereft of its legitimate power, and almost obliged to make way for another ministry.

The growing importance attached to this control by the Government of the day over all details of House of Commons business may be seen by a comparison of two defeats of a Gladstone ministry recorded in Lord Cranbrook's memoirs, and more fully dealt with in Lord Morley's Gladstone.' In 1873 Gladstone was defeated on the Irish University Bill by three votes, several of his own side voting against him. On this occasion Disraeli, being in a minority, refused to take office, even although the Queen had promised him the power of dissolving Parliament at once. Gladstone therefore continued to carry on the Government for some months, though he represented strongly to the Queen the constitutional difficulties involved in a defeat of the Government not followed by acceptance of office by the Opposition. In 1885 he was again defeated by twelve votes, on an amendment to the Budget moved by Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. Again he resigned, although, as in 1873, he normally had a majority in the House. On this occasion Lord Salisbury, being summoned by the Queen, agreed to accept office after a lengthy negotiation, which resulted in a promise from Gladstone to facilitate the necessary business before a dissolution. The circumstances constraining Salisbury to accept office were, no doubt, stronger than in Disraeli's case, since in 1885 Gladstone's defeat was due to an amendment moved by the official Opposition. But this precedent has made it more difficult than before for an Opposition to refuse to take office after the ministry's defeat, thus confirming Gladstone's view of 1873.

Not only has the cabinet itself lost much of its real independence, and become more the delegate of the majority in the Lower House instead of being simply subject to the criticism of Parliament-but the House itself since the middle of last