The English Constitution · Chapter
Its Supposed Checks and Balances explained
This chapter examines the supposed checks and balances in the English Constitution, arguing that unlike the American system of divided sovereignty, the English Constitution has a single supreme authority.
What happens
This chapter examines the supposed checks and balances in the English Constitution, arguing that unlike the American system of divided sovereignty, the English Constitution has a single supreme authority. It focuses on the monarch's powers to dissolve the House of Commons and create new peers, showing how these powers serve as a 'regulating wheel' to correct parliamentary caprice, party spirit, and selfishness. The chapter also compares royal and unroyal forms of parliamentary government, concluding that a hereditary monarch is not essential and that a new country may adopt a parliamentary system without a king.
Themes in this chapter
Comparative Political Systems
The chapter extensively compares the English Constitution's single sovereignty with the American system of divided powers, analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Monarchy and Public Sentiment
Discusses the role of the monarch in dissolving Parliament and creating peers, and whether a hereditary king is essential or useful for parliamentary government.
Cabinet Government and Parliamentary Sovereignty
Examines the supreme authority in the English Constitution and how the power to dissolve the Commons serves as a regulator of parliamentary sovereignty.
Characters to notice
- George III
Mentioned as an example of a monarch who assailed his governments, depriving the Premier of due authority and encouraging intrigues.
- Queen Victoria
Referenced indirectly through the discussion of the monarch's powers at the end of an administration, including the power to dissolve the Commons and create peers.
Key passages
“But we happily find that a new country need not fall back into the fatal division of powers incidental to a Presidential government; it may, if other conditions serve, obtain the ready, well-placed, identical sort of sovereignty which belongs to the English Constitution, under the unroyal form of Parliamentary government.”
A new nation does not have to adopt the problematic separation of powers found in presidential systems; instead, it can achieve the same unified and effective sovereignty as the English Constitution through a parliamentary system without a monarch.
Summarizes the chapter's conclusion that parliamentary government can exist without hereditary royalty.
“The regulator, as I venture to call it, of our single sovereignty is the power of dissolving the otherwise sovereign chamber confided to the chief executive.”
The mechanism that controls our unified supreme authority is the executive's power to dissolve the House of Commons, which would otherwise be sovereign.
Key concept explaining how the dissolution power acts as a check on parliamentary sovereignty.
“It enables the popular will—the will of which the executive is the exponent, the will of which it is the appointee—to carry out within the Constitution desires and conceptions which one branch of the Constitution dislikes and resists.”
The dissolution power allows the executive, as the representative of the people's will, to implement policies that a particular branch of government opposes, all within constitutional bounds.
Explains the function of dissolution as a safety valve for popular will against parliamentary obstruction.