in no case can it be departed from without the consent of the House, it ceases to be advice: it becomes a rule or law, which Parliament has no right to prescribe to the Sovereign, and which no minister, faithful to his position and its obligations, could advise him to accept as a rule or law.[1] For ministers to seek the approval of Parliament—it might be a tame and controlled and submissive Parliament—in the course of negotiations and in the acceptance of the preliminaries of a treaty, might reveal that they were conscious of failure to secure the interests of the nation, rather than that they were moving towards an indubitable success such as could never fear the light of criticism in days to come.
But it was more especially with the establishment of a more democratically based constitution in the nineteenth century that criticisms of the parliamentary system of Britain, in relation to the conduct of foreign policy, became sharp and severe, Under a parliamentary party system, resting on the ultimate power which is vested in a wide and inconstant electorate, it has been only with the utmost care and difficulty that the principle of continuity in foreign policy has been, in general, successfully asserted in Britain; and, with continuity, has come the gain of a large measure of trustworthiness in the eyes of foreign States. The presumption in a system that rests on parties and majorities is in favour of change and towards instability.[2] Bismarck, pre-eminently on this account, distrusted the foreign policy of Britain and the making of compacts
- ↑ Coxe, loc. cit.
- ↑ We are not here engaged upon a comparative study of political delinquency. Cf. the words of Napoleon III when he was expressing to Malmesbury his desire to be inseparable from England: 'The great difficulty is your form of Government, which changes the Queen's Ministers so often and so suddenly. It is such a risk to adopt a line of policy with you, as one may be left in the lurch by a new Administration.'—Memoirs, under date March 20, 1853.
