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often have been easy for those who desired a change to 'get at,' or to remove, an obnoxious tribune. Yet the Constitution of Rome, regarded on its legal side, changed comparatively little in the three centuries that lie between the Licinian laws and the age of Sulla, for most of those deviations from ancient usage which, as we can now see, were working towards its fall, were in form quite legal, being merely occasional resorts to expedients which the Constitution recognized, though they had been more rarely and more cautiously used in older and better days. So in England, the exercise of the sovereign power is lodged in an assembly which can, on occasion, act with extraordinary promptitude, as when some while ago (April 9, 1883) the Explosives Act was passed through the House of Commons in a few hours (the standing orders having been suspended), and having been forthwith passed by the House of Lords also, received the royal assent next day. So the most sacred rules and principles of the Constitution might with perfect legality of form be abolished-Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement includedjust as quickly as the Explosives Act was passed. Yet the main lines of the English frame of government have since 1689 and 1701 remained legally the same; and the most important changes made since the latter year have been effected after long and strenuous controversies 1. We all know how hard it is to secure even small constitutional improvements, such as the abolition of the provision, confessedly useless and certainly troublesome,

The two most important changes, the Union with Scotland and the Union with Ireland, were, however, among those most quickly carried through.

which obliges a member of the House of Commons to vacate his seat and seek re-election on his being appointed a Minister of the Crown.

One explanation of this apparent paradox is (though sometimes neglected) obvious enough. The stability of any constitution depends not so much on its form as on the social and economic forces that stand behind and support it; and if the form of the constitution corresponds to the balance of those forces, their support maintains it unchanged. Two other reasons deserve to be more fully stated.

A Flexible or Common Law Constitution sometimes owes its stability to the very conditions which have enabled it to grow out of isolated laws and mere usages into a firmly settled Frame of Government. There have no doubt been many cases, such as those of most of the Greek cities of antiquity, where the eager restless spirit of the people and the violence of faction never allowed any system of government to last long enough to strike deep root. Such constitutions were often enacted all in one piece, and would have been made Rigid, had the citizens who enacted them known how to make them so. They were seldom the growth of long-continued usage. But the best instances of Flexible Constitutions have been those which grew up and lived on in nations of a conservative temper, nations which respected antiquity, which valued precedents, which liked to go on doing a thing in the way their fathers had done it before them. This type of national character is what enables the Flexible Constitution to develop; this supports and cherishes it. The very fact that the legal right to make extensive changes has long existed, and has not been

abused, disposes an assembly to be cautious and moderate in the use of that right. Those who have always enjoyed power are least likely to abuse it1. This truth might be illustrated both from Rome and from England; and, indeed, from Switzerland also, though the argument which tries to prove the stupid conservatism of democracy from the habits of rural communities in the last-named country has been pressed too far by Sir H. Maine and others, since in rural communities, where nearly every one is a citizen, and well off, and most men about equally well off, the usual motives for making political changes do not exist.

A further reason may be found in the fact that a constitution which has come down in the form of a mass of laws, precedents and customs is not only more mysterious, and therefore more august, to the minds of the ordinary citizens than one they can read in a document, but is not felt by them to lie at their mercy and to live only by their pleasure. A constitution embodied in a document which they have seen drafted, and have enacted by their votes, has no element of antiquity or mystery. It issues from the sovereignty of the people, it reminds them of their sovereignty, it suggests to them nothing more exalted. Perhaps it has been the work of one party in the State; and if that party becomes discredited, it may share the discredit. The dignity which a remote and half mythic origin gives to constitutions, as it does to royal families, was in the ancient world and the Middle Ages enhanced by religious associations. In Greece and Italy the tutelary deities of the city watched over the oldest laws. In mediaeval countries

1 Α χαιοπλούτων δεσποτῶν πολλὴ χάρις, Aesch. Αgam. 1002.

the order of the State seemed an expression of the Will of God. Although these sentiments have vanished from the modern world, the fact that an old constitution represents a long course of progressive development, or, to use a somewhat vulgarized term, of evolution, gives it some claim on the respect of imaginative or philosophical minds. These sources of moral strength have been found sufficient in many countries to secure an enduring life for political institutions which the people, or a legislative body, had it in their power to change, and which, in some instances, ought to have been replaced by other institutions more suited to their altered environment.

It would, therefore, be an error to pronounce Flexible Constitutions unstable. Their true note, their distinctive merit, is to be elastic. They can be stretched or bent so as to meet emergencies, without breaking their framework; and when the emergency has passed, they slip back into their old form, like a tree whose outer branches have been pulled on one side to let a vehicle pass. Just because their form is not rigidly fixed, a temporary change is not felt to be a serious change. The sentiment of respect for the established order is not shaken. The old habits are maintained, and the machine, modified perhaps in some detail which the mass of the people scarcely notice, seems to go on working as before. Whether the working is really the same is another matter. During two centuries and a half, from Edward the Third till James the First, the Constitution of England remained in its legal aspect scarcely altered. Though at some moments within that period Parliament seemed to have mightily gained on the Crown, and at others the

Crown seemed to be dominating Parliament, yet it was, until the Civil War, doubtful whether any permanent change had been effected. From the days of Queen Anne to those of William the Fourth the Constitution preserved a legal character practically the same. But it had been altered essentially in substance. So we may say that while the Flexible character of a constitution sometimes enables it to recover from shocks without injury, that character sometimes conceals the effects of a shock, since these effects may take the form of changes of usage and changes of opinion among the citizens which have not been expressed, perhaps hardly can be expressed, in a definite legal form. The relations to one another of the two Houses of the British Parliament, and the relations of Parliament to the now self-governing British Colonies, are instances in point.

No constitution illustrates these phenomena better than did that of Rome. It was a complicated piece of work, made of many pieces, firmly attached, yet each piece playing freely. It had to be bent, twisted, stretched in many ways, under the pressure of divers exigencies. But it stood the strain of being bent or stretched, and when the force that had bent it was withdrawn, could return so nearly to its original shape as to seem to have never been disturbed. The change from consuls to military tribunes, the frequent appointment of a dictator, the memorable episode of the Decemvirate, the creation of new magistracies, even the admission of new and sometimes large masses of persons to citizenship and voting power, and the adaptation of its old machinery to the new task of governing conquered provinces, did not, during several centuries, permanently disturb its

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