PART I ORIGIN AND SPIRIT OF THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION It THE English Constitution is undoubtedly the first of all free constitutions in age, in importance, and in originality. It existed, with all its main features, four hundred years earlier than any other constitution. has served more or less as the model for all existing constitutions. It contains the explanation, and embodies the true meaning, of more than one provision which its imitators have not always understood or have knowingly diverted from its first intention. No general or enlightened study of positive constitutional law can be undertaken without an exhaustive knowledge of this capital example. But the course to be pursued in acquiring this knowledge cannot be compared to any ordinary path, and especially not to the broad highway which the French jurists have laid out by rule and line in the domain of their law. It ought rather to be compared in the words of Pascal to un chemin qui marche, or to a river whose moving surface glides away at one's feet, meandering in and out in endless curves, now seeming to disappear in a whirlpool, now almost lost to sight in the verdure... Before venturing upon this river you must be sure to take in the whole of its course from a distance, you must study the chain of mountains in which it rises, the affluents which swell its waters, the valleys in which it widens out, the sharp turns where it gets choked with sand, and the alluvial soil which it deposits on its banks. The most fertile of these preparatory studies, and that which should come first, is the analysis of the sources of the Constitution. Section i IN the year 1793 Hérault de Séchelles inquired at the Bibliothèque Nationale for a copy of the laws of Minos. Any one would make the same mistake now who hunted for the text of the English Constitution. There is no text but there are texts. These texts are of every age and have never been codified. Nor even taken all together do they contain nearly the whole of English constitutional law, the greater part of which is unwritten. On any question of importance it is necessary to refer, in almost every case, to several different laws whose dates are centuries apart, or to a series of precedents which go far back into history. For example, |