eminent leadership, the Crown may choose from among the two or three most prominent members of the party. The members of the Cabinet are the heads of the principal executive departments. They are appointed nominally by the Prime Minister, but the Prime Minister's power of choice is limited by the fact that he is obliged. to appoint such members of his party as can command Parliamentary support.

The Cabinet acts not only as an executive board, but it also controls legislation. The more important bills are commonly introduced by its members. Bills introduced by private persons are generally passed or rejected, as seems good to the ministers controlling a majority of the votes. When it is no longer possible to command this majority, the Cabinet either goes out of office at once. or it may make a final appeal to the country by a dissolution of Parliament, and a call for an election of a new House of Commons. If in this new House the ministers fail to obtain a majority, they must resign immediately.

In all measures brought before Parliament the Cabinet acts as a unit. Under ordinary circumstances each member is responsible for the action of the Cabinet as a whole, and the Cabinet as a whole is responsible for the action of each member. When the members resign, they resign as a body.

It must however be borne in mind that the above description is that of the norm of the Cabinet. Perhaps

at no time in its history has the actual Cabinet quite answered to it. Cabinet government was not fully developed until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and at present there is a strong tendency to return to the system of government by departments in preference to the system of government by the Cabinet as a whole.1

In order to a full presentation of our subject, it is necessary to trace the history of the Privy Council of which the Cabinet is a committee, the separation of this committee from the Council as a whole, the gradual transfer of the power of appointment and dismissal from King to Parliament, the rise in power of the House of Commons, and the accompanying decline of the House of Lords, the development of the party system upon which Cabinet government is based, and, finally, so far as may be, the internal history of the Cabinet.

We will begin with the Privy Council. It was the custom of the Norman kings, as of all feudal monarchs, to summon the great nobles to meet with them frequently for purposes of consultation and advice. By these assemblies of the nobles the feudal state was held together. Hence the King was even more anxious to

1 The terms Ministry and Administration are sometimes used as synonymous with Cabinet; but they are a little more comprehensive in their signification, including officials standing near the Cabinet, as well as the Cabinet ministers.

compel attendance than the nobles were to attend. While on all important occasions he convened as many of the magnates as could be brought together, he kept a small body of officials about him permanently. This Council comprised the great officers of state, religion, and the household. The body of nobles that assembled on special occasions, summoned by special writ, came to be known as the Great Council — Magnum Concilium

of the realm. Whence, in later times, the Parliament. The smaller body of officials, the members of which were of course also members of the Great Council, was known as the permanent or Continual Council - Concilium Ordinarium. Whence, the Privy Council.

The Concilium Ordinarium was composed of men of all variety of opinion, who were frequently, perhaps generally, violently opposed to each other. For it was not considered that they were under any obligations to agree, but each one was bound to advise the King according to the best of his ability. Hence there were often very stormy sessions of Council, the divisions in that body probably reaching a climax in the reign of Henry VI. Manifestly the King could not follow the advice of all his councillors, and he frequently followed the advice of none of them. Indeed, not until a late period in the development of the Cabinet did the sovereign consider himself under obligations to ask, much less to take, the advice of his ministers on all matters.

The powers of this Council emanated directly from the Crown, and consequently were executive and judicial, rather than legislative and financial. But in the early days it was difficult to distinguish between the functions of different bodies; and when the King found it easier to get what he wanted through the Concilium Ordinarium than through the Magnum Concilium, he arranged to get it in this way. So it came to pass that pretty much the same things were done in the two councils, but under different names. The King taxed his people through both; but when it was done through the Concilium Ordinarium, it was asking for an aid. Through the Magnum Concilium, it was imposing a tallage, or negotiating the concession of a custom. Legislation was accomplished through the agency of both councils; but in the one case ordinances were said to be issued, in the other laws to be enacted.

There was, therefore, a constant rivalry between the two bodies, a feeling that the Concilium Ordinarium was usurping the functions of the Magnum Concilium. Nor was the hostility lessened when the latter developed into the Parliament. There is no more important or more interesting feature in the history of England between 1295 and 1640 than the struggle between Parliament There was a constant effort on the part of Parliament to do away with irregular forms of taxation by means of the Council, and of legislation

and the King's Council.

by ordinance. For example, the charter confirmed in 1297 bound the King to levy no extraordinary taxes, "without the consent of the realm, and to the common profit thereof." Yet there seems to have been very little abatement of illegal taxation, and the Parliamentary records of the period abound in protests against it.

1390 the commons petitioned that the chancellor and Council might not, after the close of Parliament, make any ordinance "contrary to the common law or ancient customs of the land, and the statutes aforetime ordained, or to be ordained in the present Parliament." But the King replied that "what had hitherto been done, should be done still, saving the prerogative of the Crown." And it was one of the charges brought against this King, Richard II., that he had maintained that the laws were "in the mouth and breast of the King," and that he by himself could change and frame the laws of the kingdom. Down to the period of the civil wars of the seventeenth century legislation by ordinance was common, and the matter was not finally settled on paper until the reign of Queen Anne, when it was enacted that an ordinance could not make a new law, but could only add force to an old one.

The great objection to government by Council was that it was government by a body responsible to no one save the King. Hence the effort on the part of Parliament to make the Council in some sense responsible to itself.