The success is primarily due to the peculiar provision of the English Constitution, which places the choice of the executive in the “people’s House”; but it could not have been thoroughly achieved except for two parts, which I venture to call the “safety-valve” of the Constitution, and the “regulator.”

The safety-valve is the peculiar provision of the Constitution, of which I spoke at great length in my essay on the House of Lords. The head of the executive can overcome the resistance of the second chamber by choosing new members of that chamber; if he do not find a majority, he can make a majority. This is a safety-valve of the truest kind. 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. It lets forth a dangerous accumulation of inhibited power, which might sweep this Constitution before it, as like accumulations have often swept away like Constitutions.