I

CHAPTER X

CONSTITUTIONAL MONARCHY

SHALL not in this chapter pay much attention to "absolute" or "personal" monarchy. Serious think

ers have in the past argued for that form of government. At the cultural stage of mediaeval Europe the absolute monarch stimulated the same instinct of personal obedience as did the "old man" of the early human or prehuman group, and so enabled coöperation to take place among people who would otherwise have been helpless against an organized enemy; and the fact that he was selected by primogeniture helped to save his subjects from those periodical struggles between rival leaders which must have been one of the main difficulties of primitive society. But mankind are now apparently agreed in rejecting hereditary personal monarchy as a practical means of controlling the internal and external problems of a modern industrial nation. We have found that the complexity and range of modern government require the interaction of many minds and wills, under conditions inconsistent with the life-long dominance of one man or woman. And the same complexity and range require that

anyone who takes a direct and leading part in the government of a great community or association of communities shall be above that average of health and intelligence and character which alone, at the present stage of eugenic art, can be secured by hereditary succession. The recently published letters and telegrams and minutes of the Russian Czar and Czaritsa and the German Kaiser, before and after August, 1914, disclose a danger which no great modern nation is likely voluntarily to incur again. Even in the minor instance of the British House of Lords, the expedient of personal hereditary power only survives because British statesmen are not agreed on any substitute for it.

Nor shall I pay much attention to the forms of elective monarchy which have been tried in the Holy Roman Empire, in Poland, and in France under the Napoleons. Elective monarchy has been generally found either to lead to hereditary monarchy, or to involve most of the dangers of hereditary power without its advantage of security in succession. The chief importance of the idea of elective monarchy may, indeed, in the future be found in its influence on the position of the President of the United States. The only form of monarchy which I shall here consider is the Constitutional Monarchy which exists in the British Empire, and in a few countries, such as Italy, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, and Greece, which have for the most part deliberately imitated the British example.

British constitutional monarchy originated in the deadlock reached during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between the British Parliament and the British Crown. It was defended by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century constitutional writers as a "balance of

power" between two independent forces, a compromise which left to the monarch real but "limited" authority.1 It was "limited" monarchy in this sense which was accepted by the Kaiser when in April, 1917, he promised "to hold the just balance between the people and the monarchy." But such a "limited" monarchy is not what most British constitutional writers since 1832 have meant by "constitutional" monarchy. Our monarchy is now generally described, not as a means of checking and balancing parliamentary government, but as a means of making parliamentary government both absolute and secure. "The constitutional King," said Sir George Cornewall Lewis, "is King, in order that no one else may be King." The appropriate stimulus, the argument runs, of the human instinct of obedience is a person. In a republican government the person who will stimulate the instinct of obedience will be the President or prime minister, and he will thereby be enabled to resist a parliamentary majority. Constitutional monarchy, on the other hand, concentrates the instinctive passion of obedience on a person so chosen, trained, and situated, that all his actions are the actions of a parliamentary ministry. The constitutional monarchy becomes a "crowned republic," or rather a crowned parliamentary majority.

The clearest statement of this argument is given in the chapters on Monarchy in Walter Bagehot's English Con

1 See Blackstone's Commentaries, Vol. I, Chap. VII, "One of the principal bulwarks of civil liberty, or, in other words of the British constitution, [is] the limitation of the sovereign's prerogative by bounds so certain and notorious, that it is impossible he should ever exceed them, without the consent of the people."

2 Quoted by Sir Herbert Samuel, Liberalism (1902), p. 294.

stitution, in which he bases it on that psychological analysis which he used with all the gusto of a scientific pioneer who was also a born man of letters. He insists, not only on the reality and force of the instinct to obey (which, as a Lamarckian, he ascribes to the biological inheritance of acquired habit) but also on the quantitative biological limitations of human imagination and knowledge. "The French people," he says, "were asked: Will you be governed by Louis Napoleon, or will you be governed by an assembly? The French people said: We will be governed by the one man we can imagine, and not by the many people we cannot imagine" (pp. 106107). "So long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and republics weak because they appeal to the understanding" (p. 112). Again and again, Bagehot employs the parallel of magic and the mystery religions: "That which is mystical in its claims, that which is occult in its mode of action . . . is the sort of thing. . . which . . . comes home to the mass of men" (pp. 75-79). "The monarchy by its religious sanction now confirms all our political order. . . . It gives now a vast strength to the entire constitution, by enlisting on its behalf the credulous obedience of enormous masses" (p. 117). Bagehot (as he wrote in his new introduction of 1872) was "exceedingly afraid of the ignorant multitude of the new constituencies" created by that parliamentary reform which was contemplated when the book was written, and carried out in 1867. Britain was "a community

3 Originally written as a series of articles in the Fortnightly Review, published as a book in 1867, and republished with a new introduction in 1872. I quote from Nelson's edition in the Library of Notable Books.

in which primitive barbarism lay as a recognized basis to acquired civilization" (p. III). "Those who doubt should go out into their kitchens" (p. 77). "The real question is," he says, "will they defer to wealth and rank and to the higher qualities of which these are the rough symbols and the common accompaniments?" The continued deference of the masses to the classes could only be secured if the psychological analysis of British monarchy were confined to the Fortnightly Review and to literary treatises on the constitution. "Its mystery is its life. We must not let daylight upon magic" (p. 134).*

Bagehot wrote before the British people had become conscious that a new Empire has taken the place of that which we lost in 1783. But since Disraeli's premiership of 1874-1880 and the Jubilee of 1887, Bagehot's psychological argument has constantly been used to prove the vital importance of the constitutional monarchy to the maintenance of the imperial connection. Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, in his Republican Tradition in Europe (1911), says, "the taste for ritual, for playthings, for makebelieve, is deeply rooted in human nature," that the colonists are "fascinated by the pomp of an ancient and dignified institution which they have no means of reproducing in their several communities" (p. 277). In similar language Mr. and Mrs. Webb wrote in 1920 that the King's "duty as a King is not the exercise of governmental power in any of its aspects, but . . . the performance of a whole series of rites and ceremonies, which lend

4 On the other hand, I have heard socialists argue rather unconvincingly as a reason for maintaining the monarchy, that the credulous loyalty of the property-owning classes may be useful to a socialist government.