"I presume," said he, "that quite lately a list of Jubilee honors has been submitted to you for approval. What does your approval mean? Is a single one of them your own selection? Do you know what the majority of them are for?"
The King shook his head. "Mostly they are political," said he. "The Government has the right; I have no call to interfere. Isn't it perhaps better that I should not interfere?"
"It may be arguable, sir, that the uncomfortably high position to which we are born cuts us off from the more strenuously fermenting issues of the political game, and from the malignities and hypocrisies of that party system of which, as a nation, we pretend to be so proud, and are secretly so much ashamed. It may be well that some single authority should stand removed from and above party, if in the hands of that authority there is also left power of sentence and dismissal, power also to withhold unmerited reward. But that power you are no longer expected to exercise,—it lies like a china nest-egg never to be hatched, but only to promote the laying of other eggs.
"Yet while your prerogatives have been thus diminished, the claim that you shall act with judicial impartiality has increased, and has become a fetter. To oppose any course of ministerial action to-day is by implication to ally yourself with the other side. You are in the position of a judge whose directions the jury has authority to ignore, and from whose hands all power of imposing a penalty has practically been withdrawn. And these changes have been thrust upon the monarchy by the will, not of the people, but of that class or section which in the evolution of our political system happened at the time to be the ruling one. At one period it was the Church, at another the army, at another the landlord or the capitalist; it was never that latent force lying in the future, that peace-loving, industrial democracy which to-day we are still striving to hold back from its aim. These ruling powers of the past have now concentrated on the Cabinet as their last line of defense; and so at the present day it is the Cabinet which has the largest control not only of patronage (much of it corruptly applied), but of certain penalizing devices by which monetary pressure can be brought upon those who thwart its will. By its practical usurpation of the Crown's right to decree a general election, and by its control of the party funds, from which parliamentary candidates are subsidized and assisted to the poll, it is able to hold over the heads of its supporters a financial threat to which very few can remain indifferent. And this is how our so-called popular chamber is manipulated and run. The power of the purse (I speak now of the moneys voted for public service) lies almost entirely in the hands of those who themselves have the largest monetary interest for keeping away from their constituencies and maintaining their leaders in power; and as a consequence the Ministry's evasion of all regulations and safeguards, its increasing seizure of parliamentary time, its postponement of finance to a date in each session when the legislature's energies are exhausted, have become more and more corrupt in character. Why, the very minister whose duty it is to see that members are constant in their voting and their attendance is the one with whom lies, if not the distribution of patronage, at least its recommendation. He is the go-between, and they know it. How likely, then, are the rank and file to throw their Government out of office when the immediate result will be not only to transfer these bribes to the hands of their political opponents but to inflict upon themselves the cost of a contested election which privately they cannot afford, and to face which they are accordingly obliged to go, cap in hand, to the very men they have voted from power, but who still have absolute control of the party organization and its funds?"
Here Max stopped to take breath.
IV
"But can you suggest any other way?" questioned the King. "Surely we must have party?"
"I have no reason to suggest it," answered his son, "it stands written in history. Under our more ancient Constitution the House of Laity came pledged from its electorate to criticise, and to control (by the giving or withholding of supply) the acts of a separate and administratively independent body. Now Government is carried on by an administrative body, which, though nominally dependent, has at its back a majority of the elected pledged not to criticise. And the difference between the two systems is as the difference between darkness and light. That body is now forcing the monarchy also into the same non-critical attitude, or at least is securing that the criticism shall be impotent of result. And I have the right, sir, to ask what are you doing to-day to preserve for me the powers which you inherited?"
"To tell you the truth, my son," answered the King, "it is only lately that I have begun trying to find out what those powers are. It seems a strange confession to make after twenty-five years; but it is true. When I came to the throne, at a moment of great political changes, I was entirely uninstructed and quite naturally I made mistakes, letting things go when I was told to. From that false position successive ministries have never allowed me to escape; they have kept me (I have only just found it out) as uninstructed as they possibly could. They burden me with routine work, they busy my hands while starving my brain. One of their little ways—done on the score of relieving me of unnecessary trouble—has been to submit in large batches at intervals important documents requiring my assent, smuggling them in under cover of others. And when I find it out, they plead unavoidable delay and urgency, as though it were quite an exception. But I tell you it has been going on, oh, dear me, yes, for a long time now; and the General has known of it as well as any of them! The other day I made one of my secretaries go through the entries, and I find that in the last year I signed sixty Acts of Parliament and about fifteen hundred other State documents, besides mere commissions, titles, diplomas, and all that sort of thing, and I tell you that I haven't a ghost of a notion of what more than a dozen were about! They don't give me time to digest anything; and you are quite right, it's a system!"
"Well," said his son, "at least they don't treat you much worse than they do the people's representatives. It has become their regular plan now to bring in six bills all rolled into one, in a form far too big and complicated ever to be properly discussed. They insert a lot of unnecessary contentiousness at the beginning, and all the really administrative part—the machinery which provides them with political handles throughout the country, and which they call the non-contentious part—at the end; and then—on the score of it being non-contentious, and because by the time they get to it the mind of the legislature is exhausted—then they shut it down with the closure. One result is that we have laws on the statute-book which don't even make grammar. Only last session the Minister of Education got a bill sent up to the Spiritual Chamber with three split infinitives in it."