The best mode of testing what we owe to the Queen is to make a vigorous effort of the imagination, and see how we should get on without her. Let us strip Cabinet government of all its accessories, let us reduce it to its two necessary constituents—a representative assembly (a House of Commons) and a Cabinet appointed by that assembly—and examine how we should manage with them only. We are so little accustomed to analyse the Constitution; we are so used to ascribe the whole effect of the Constitution to the whole Constitution, that a great many people will imagine it to be impossible that a nation should thrive or even live with only these two simple elements. But it is upon that possibility that the general imitability of the English Government depends. A monarch that can be truly reverenced, a House of Peers that can be really respected, are historical accidents nearly peculiar to this one island, and entirely peculiar to Europe. A new country, if it is to be capable of a Cabinet government, if it is not to degrade itself to Presidential government, must create that Cabinet out of its native resources—must not rely on these Old World debris.
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