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tive power of Parliament, advantage was taken of the old royal prerogative and of that ancient body the Privy Council. Parliament gave power to the Crown to issue Orders in Council dealing with large classes of matters which must otherwise have been dealt with by statute; and these Orders take effect sometimes at once, sometimes when a certain period has elapsed during which they have lain before Parliament and received from it no disapproval. In this way a vast mass of secondary legislation is annually enacted which, though it does not directly issue from Parliament, carries parliamentary authority, and does not infringe the principle that Parliament is the only true source of law. And, similarly, out of the ancient judicial functions of the Crown and of the Council which advised the Crown, functions which a century ago seemed to be lapsing into desuetude, there has been evolved a new system of judicature. A body called the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, somewhat resembling the Consistory of the Roman Emperors, has been created, and now acts as a Supreme Court of Appeal for all the transmarine possessions of Britain, whether Indian or Colonial.

The merit of this elastic quality in such Constitutions as the Roman and the British is that it affords a means of preventing or minimizing revolutions by meeting them halfway. Let us note how each kind of Constitution, the Rigid and the Flexible, behaves when a serious crisis arrives, in which one section of the nation is bent on changing the Constitution, and the other on maintaining it. A Rigid Constitution, if the legal means provided for altering it cannot be used for the want of the prescribed legal majority, resists the pressure. It may of course resist successfully, but if so, probably after a conflict which has shaken the State and excited hostility to it in the minds of a large part of the people. It may, however, if the assailing forces are very strong, be broken, and if so, broken past mending. A Flexible Constitution, however, being more easily and promptly

alterable, and being usually a less firmly welded and cohesive structure, can bend without breaking, can be modified in such a way as to satisfy popular demands, can escape revolution by the practical submission of one of the contending forces in the particular dispute, that submission being recognized as a precedent which will be followed, even though it has not been embodied in any law or other formal document. The extinction of the right once claimed by the House of Lords to alter money bills is one instance. Or it may be made to evolve some organ which, though really new, conceals its novelty by keeping some of the old colour, and thus it may continue to work with no palpable breach of continuity. The knowledge that a constitution can be changed without any tremendous effort helps to make a party of revolution less violent and a party of resistance less stubborn, disposing both to some compromise. At Rome the resort to the appointment of military tribunes with consular power when the plebs demanded, and the patricians would not yet consent to the election of a plebeian Consul, delayed revolution till opinion had so changed that the danger of revolution had passed away. So, later, the compromise by which a Praetor was created with the functions of a Consul but with a special range of duties appeased conservative feeling and smoothed the passage from the old order to the new. The history of the English Constitution is a history of continual small changes, no single one of which, hardly even the Bill of Rights at the time of the socalled Revolution, or the Reform Act of 1832, made the system look substantially different. Something no doubt was cut away, and something was added, but the structure as a whole seemed the same, because far more of the old was left than there was added of the new.

The two main processes which have turned the government of England from the monarchy of the Tudors into what may be called the plutocratic democracy of to-day have been the limitation of the royal prerogative and the

transference of the right of suffrage from a few to the multitude. Both processes have gone on slowly, by a succession of steps, each comparatively small, but all in the same direction. Accordingly the strife of parties. has been mitigated by the existence at all, or nearly all, moments, of a large body of persons who desired reform, but only a moderate reform. They are the persons who impose compromise on the extremists to the right and to the left of them, and they can do so because the Constitution permits small reforms to be easily effected. The party of change, which would be a party of revolution if it was obliged to have large changes or none, is apt to be divided, and its more moderate section is, or soon passes into, a party only of reform. The English Chartists of 1840-50 caused some alarm. But between them and the old Constitutional Whigs there were several sections of opinion passing by imperceptible gradations into one another; and when it was seen that the current was setting towards changes approximating to those which the Chartists demanded, their less violent men were by degrees reabsorbed into the general body of the Whig or Liberal party, the latter at the same time moving with the times; and some of those changes, in particular vote by ballot, were ultimately obtained with no great friction.

It must nevertheless be remembered that in the history of most States a crisis is apt to arrive when elasticity becomes a danger, in that it tempts people to abuse the facility for change. There is no better sign of strength in a man's physical constitution than his being able to make some short, sudden, and violent effort without suffering afterwards from doing so; and there is nothing of which the happy possessor of such strength is more proud. But those men who have reached middle life are aware that the temptation to strain one's strength in this exultant spirit is perilous. Repeated impunity is apt to encourage a man to go on trying experiments when the conditions are perhaps less favourable, or when the re

serve of force is less abundant than it was in youth. The story goes that the famous Milo of Croton, passing alone through a forest, saw an oak into which woodmen who were preparing to fell it had driven wedges. Pulling out the wedges, he tried to rive it asunder. But he had no longer the fullness of his youthful strength. The returning tree caught him by the hands and held him fast till he died. In our own days Captain Webb, stimulated by his feat in swimming across the English Channel, sought still bolder exploits, and perished in the Whirlpool Rapid below Niagara Falls. So the Romans, having many a time given exceptional powers for special occasions to their magistrates, found at last that they had created precedents which enabled the old free Constitution to be in substance overthrown. Sulla became a dictator of a new kind. After a while he resigned his power, but the example showed that monarchy was not far off. Julius Caesar also received exceptional authority, and used it to form an army which extinguished the Republic. The dictatorship he had held passed under other forms into permanent absolutism, and what was practically a revolution was ultimately carried through with a certain deference to the old constitutional forms. In England, Parliament, during the sixteenth century, once or twice gave powers to the Crown which brought the Constitution into danger. In the seventeenth century the monarchy was abolished, and a Protectorate set up by revolutionary methods. This was the result of a war which had destroyed a vital part of the old machine, much to the regret of most of those who had in the first instance taken up arms. We have never since that date (except under King James the Second) seen the Constitution in any real danger.

It is, however, often suggested that the enormous power possessed by Parliament might be used to upset fundamental institutions with reckless haste, and that it might therefore be prudent to impose restrictions on parliamentary action. And those who note the way in

which Parliament bends and staggers under the increasing burden of work laid on it, coupled with the inadequacy of its rules to secure the prompt dispatch of business 1, have frequently predicted that the House of Commons may one day deliver itself into the hands of the Cabinet, the power of party organization having grown so strong that the head of each Cabinet will be deemed a sort of dictator, drawing his authority, nominally of course, from the House of Commons, but really from a so-called direct 'mandate' of the electors 2. Others draw a yet more horrible picture of a party machine, which they call the Caucus, dictating a policy to the electors on the one hand, and to the Cabinet on the other, itself reigning in the spirit of a tyrant, but under the forms of the Constitution. If the British Constitution, as we have hitherto known it, should perish, there is little reason to fear it will do so in this eminently ignoble fashion 3.

When Flexible Constitutions come to an end, they do so in one of two ways. Sometimes they pass into an autocracy, either dying a violent death by revolution, or expiring in a more natural manner through the extension and development, under legal forms, of one of their organs, to a point at which it practically supersedes and replaces the other organs. Sometimes, on the other hand, they pass into Rigid Constitutions. The causes which induce this latter change belong,

1 This was written in 1884. Since that year sweeping changes have been made in the procedure of the House of Commons which have greatly curtailed the rights and opportunities of private members while increasing the powers of the Ministry of the day. They have not, however, made that House able to discharge all or nearly all the work that falls on it; and it is becoming (under the new rules) less and less careful in the exercise of its powers of voting money.

This apprehension was often expressed between 1880 and 1885. Nothing has occurred since to justify it so far as the dictatorship of any single person is concerned ; and it may have in great part arisen from the fact that from 1867 to 1885 the headships of both the two great parties had been vested in exceptionally vigorous and influential leaders. There can however be no doubt that the power of the Cabinet as against the House of Commons has grown steadily and rapidly: and it appears (1901) to be still growing.

Of this supposed danger also much less is heard now than in 1884. The thing that was then called the Birmingham Caucus' has ceased to be used to terrify the timid.

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