The American Commonwealth. Viscount James Bryce

applies it to that purpose, perhaps in paying the army, perhaps in building a bridge.

      The executive is, in civilized countries, itself the creature of the law, deriving therefrom its existence as well as its authority. Sometimes, as in France, it is so palpably and formally. The president of the Republic has been called into existence by the Constitution. Sometimes, as in England, it is so substantially, though not formally. The English Crown dates from a remote antiquity, when custom and belief had scarcely crystallized into law; and though Parliament has repeatedly determined its devolution upon particular persons or families—it is now held under the Act of Settlement—no statute has ever affected to confer upon it its rights to the obedience of the people. But practically it holds its powers at the pleasure of Parliament, which has in some cases expressly limited them, and in others given them a tacit recognition. We may accordingly say of England and of all constitutional monarchies as well as of republics that the executive in all its acts must obey the law, that is to say, if the law prescribes a particular course of action, the executive must take that course; if the law forbids a particular course, the executive must avoid it.

      It is therefore clear that the extent of the power of the executive magistrate depends upon the particularity with which the law is drawn, that is, upon the amount of discretion which the law leaves to him. If the law is general in its terms, the executive has a wide discretion. If, for instance, the law prescribes simply that a duty of ten per cent ad valorem be levied on all manufactured goods imported, it rests with the executive to determine by whom and where that duty shall be collected, and on what principles it shall be calculated. If the law merely creates a post office, the executive may fix the rate of payment for letters and parcels, and the conditions on which they will be received and delivered. In these cases the executive has a large field within which to exert its free will and choice of means. Power means nothing more than the extent to which a man can make his individual will prevail against the wills of other men, so as to control them. Hence, when the law gives to a magistrate a wide discretion, he is powerful, because the law clothes his will with all the power of the state. On the other hand, if the law goes into very minute details, directing this to be done and that not to be done, it narrows the discretion of the executive magistrate. His personal will and choice are gone. He can no longer be thought of as a coordinate power in the state. He becomes a mere servant, a hand to carry out the bidding of the legislative brain, or, we may even say, a tool in the legislative hand.

      As the legislature has been the body through which the people have chiefly asserted their authority, we find that lawmaking assemblies, whether primary or representative, have always sought to extend their province and to subject the executive to themselves. They have done this in several ways. In the democracies of ancient Greece the assembly of all citizens not only passed statutes of general application, but made peace or declared war; ordered an expedition to start for Sphacteria, and put Cleon at the head of it; commanded the execution of prisoners or reprieved them; conducted, in fact, most of the public business of the city by a series of direct decrees, all of which were laws, i.e., declarations of its sovereign will. It was virtually the government. The chief executive officers of Athens, called the generals, had little authority except over the military operations in the field. Even the Roman Constitution, a far more highly developed and scientific, though also a complicated and cumbrous system, while it wisely left great discretion to the chief magistrates (requiring them, however, to consult the Senate), yet permitted the passing pro re nata of important laws, which were really executive acts, such as the law by which Pompey received an extraordinary command against Mithridates. The Romans did not draw, any more than the Greek republics, a distinction between general and special legislation.¹

      This method, in which the people directly govern as a legislature, reducing the executive magistrates to mere instruments, is inapplicable in a large country, because the mass of citizens cannot come together as an assembly. It is highly inconvenient where the legislature, though a representative body, is very numerous. England, accordingly, and the nations which have imitated England,² have taken a different method. The people (that is, the qualified voters) have allowed an executive to subsist with apparently wide powers, but they virtually choose this executive, and keep it in so close and constant a dependence upon their pleasure, that it dare not act against what it believes their will to be. The struggle for popular liberties in England took at first the form of a struggle for the supremacy of law; that is to say, it was a struggle to restrain the prerogative of the king by compelling his ministers to respect the ancient customs of the land and the statutes passed in Parliament. As the customs were always maintained, and the range of the statutes constantly widened, the executive was by degrees hemmed in within narrow limits, its discretionary power restricted, and that characteristic principle of the Constitution, which has been well called “the reign of law,” was established. It was settled that the law, i.e., the ancient customs and the statutes, should always prevail against the discretion of the Crown and its ministers, and that acts done by the servants of the Crown should be justiciable, exactly like the acts of private persons. This once achieved, the executive fairly bridled, and the ministry made to hold office at the pleasure of the House of Commons, Parliament had no longer its former motive for seeking to restrict the discretion of the ministers of the Crown by minutely particular legislation, for ministers had become so accustomed to subjection that their discretion might be trusted. Parliament has, in fact, of late years begun to sail on the other tack, and allows ministers to do many things by regulations, schemes, orders in council, and so forth, which would previously have been done by statute, generally, however, reserving to itself a right of disapproval.

      It may be asked how it comes, if this be so, that people nevertheless talk of the executive in England as being a separate and considerable authority. The answer is twofold. The English Crown has never been, so to speak, thrown into the melting pot and recast, but has continued, in external form and seeming, an independent and highly dignified part of the constitutional system.³ Parliament has never asserted a direct control over certain parts of the royal prerogative, such as the bestowal of honours, the creation of peerages, the making of appointments to office. No one at this moment can say exactly what the royal prerogative does or does not include. And secondly, the actual executive, i.e., the ministry of the day, retains some advantages which are practically, though not legally, immense. It has an initiative in all legislation, a sole initiative in financial legislation. It is a small and well organized body placed in the midst of a much larger and less organized body (i.e., the two houses), on which therefore it can powerfully act. All patronage, ecclesiastical as well as civil, lies in its gift, and though it must not use this function so as to disgust the Commons, it has great latitude in the disposal of favours. While Parliament is sitting it disposes of a large part, sometimes of the whole, of the time of the House of Commons, and can therefore advance the measures it prefers, while retarding or evading motions it dislikes. During nearly half the year Parliament is not sitting, and the necessities of a great state placed in a restless world oblige a ministry to take momentous resolutions upon its own responsibility. Finally, it includes a few men who have obtained a hold on the imagination and confidence of the people, which emboldens them to resist or even to lecture Parliament, and often to prevail, not only against its first impulses, but possibly against its deliberate wishes. And an English ministry is strong not only because it so frankly acknowledges its dependence on the Commons as not to rouse the antagonism of that body, to which, be it remembered, most ministers belong, but also because it has another power outside to which it can, in extreme cases, appeal. It may dissolve Parliament, and ask the people to judge between its views and those of the majority of the House of Commons. Sometimes such an appeal succeeds. The power of making it is at all times a resource.

      This delicate equipoise of the ministry, the House of Commons, and the nation acting at a general election, is the secret of the smooth working of the British Constitution. It reappears in two remarkable constitutions, which deserve fuller study than they have yet received from American or English publicists, those of Prussia and the new German Empire. There, however, the ministry is relatively stronger than in England, because the Crown retains not only a wider stretch of legal authority, but a greater moral influence over the people, who have had a shorter practice than the English in working free institutions, and who never forget that they are soldiers, and the king-emperor head of the army. A Prussian minister is so likely to have the nation on his side when he makes an appeal to it