[p. 123]
By such a new element, however, not only would that class be disturbed whose coherence has the affairs of state in its hands, but it is the governmental power that could be shifted out of its rut. It lies, as has been remarked, in Parliament; however much it is divided into parties and with however great vehemence these confront one another, so little are they factions; they stand within the same general interest, and a change of ministry has hitherto had significant consequences more outwardly, with regard to war and peace, than inwardly. The monarchical principle, on the other hand, no longer has much to lose in England. The departure of the Wellington ministry was, as is well known, occasioned by the minority in which it found itself over the regulation of the King’s Civil List that was to be undertaken, – an occasion which is of particular interest in that it concerned one of the few elements that are still left in England of the monarchical principle. The remainder of the demesne estates, which nevertheless had the character of family property, of private property of the royal family, just as much as the estates of the ducal, comital, baronial etc. families in England, had been ceded in the last century to the Treasury and, as compensation, a sum corresponding to the yield had been fixed, included among the rest of the budget to be granted annually by the House of Commons. This demesne property, the slender remainder of the earlier great fortune of the crown, which had been so much weakened by extravagance, chiefly by the need to buy troops and the assistance of barons in civil wars, had not undergone a separation of what was to remain family property from what was to be applied to general purposes of state. If now the quality of family and private property which belonged to one part of that remainder of fortune had already been altered, at least in form, by its conversion from landed property into a settlement sum included in the annual parliamentary
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