should a sovereign see anything here to be afraid of? To him it is, in
truth, the best of safeguards. A really loyal servant should do nothing
for which he is not prepared to answer, even though his master desires
it. This practical responsibility is of the utmost advantage to the
sovereign. Make independence, not subservience, the essential of
service, and you compel the minister to keep his soul free toward the
sovereign, you ennoble his advice, you make him staunch and patriotic,
while time-servers, the submissive instruments of a monarch's extreme
wishes and commands, may lead, and often have led, him to destruction.

"But to revert to the law of responsibility. This ought not to be in
effect a safeguard for law itself. As such, it is superfluous in this
country, where law reigns, and where it would never occur to any one
that this could be otherwise. But upon the Continent it is of the
highest importance; as, where the government is an outgrowth of a
relation of supremacy and subordination between sovereign and subject,
and the servant, trained in ideas natural to this relation, does not
know which to obey, the law of the sovereign, the existence of such a
law would deprive him of the excuse which, should he offend the law, and
so be guilty of a crime, is ready to his hand in the phrase, 'The
sovereign ordered it so, I have merely obeyed,' while it would be a
protection to the sovereign that his servants, if guilty of a crime,
should not be able to saddle him with the blame of it."--_Life of the
Prince Consort_, v., 262.]

[Footnote 7: "Lives of the Lord Chancellors," c. cxliii.]

[Footnote 8: Indeed, the opinion which Lord Campbell thus expresses is
manifestly at variance with that which he had previously pronounced in
his life of Lord Northington, where he praised the House of Lords for