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such matters by statute, or else to leave them to be settled by the action of the several organs of government each acting within its own sphere. These organs may by such action create a body of usage which, when well settled, will practically supplement the defects of the constitution, as statutes will do in like manner, so far as they are passed to cover the omitted cases.

The third class consists not of omissions but of matters which are referred to by the constitution, but in terms whose meaning is doubtful. Here the question is what interpretation is to be given to its words by the authority entitled to interpret, that authority being in some countries the legislature, in others the judicial tribunals. To the subject of Interpretation I shall presently return. Meantime, it must be noted that both Legislation and Usage in filling up the vacant spaces in the constitution, and Interpretation in explaining its application to a series of new cases as they arise upon points not expressly covered by its words, expand and develop a constitution, and may make it after a long interval of time different from what it seemed to be to those who watched its infancy. The statutes, usages, and explanations aforesaid will in fact come to form a sort of fringe to the constitution cohering with it, and possessing practically the same legal authority as its express words have. And it thus may happen that (as in the United States) a large mass of parasitic law grows up round the document or documents which contain the Constitution. Nevertheless there will still remain a distinction between this parasitic law and usage and the provisions of the constitution itself. The latter stand unchangeable, save by constitu

tional amendment. Statutes, on the other hand, can be changed by the legislature; usage may take a new direction; the decisions given interpreting the constitution may be recalled or varied by the authority that pronounced them. All these are in fact Flexible parasites growing upon a Rigid stem. Thus it will be seen that the apparent definiteness and simplicity of Documentary Constitutions may in any given case be largely qualified by the growth of a mass of quasi-constitutional matter which has to be known before the practical working of the constitution can be understood.

XII. THE STABILITY OF RIGID CONSTITUTIONS.

The stability of a constitution is an object to be much desired both because it inspires a sense of security in the minds of the citizens, encouraging order, industry and thrift, and because it enables experience to be accumulated whereby the practical working of the constitution may be improved. Political institutions are under all circumstances difficult to work, and when they are frequently changed, the nation does not learn how to work them properly. Experiment is the soul of progress, but experiments must be allowed a certain measure of time. The plant will not grow if men frequently uncover the roots to see how they are striking. Constitutions embodied in one legal document and unchangeable by the legislature, are intended to be, and would seem likely to be, peculiarly durable. Being definite, they do not give that opening to small deviations and perversions likely to arise from the vagueness of a Flexible or 'unwritten' Constitution, or from the

probable discrepancies between the different laws and traditions of which it consists. They may be battered down, but they cannot easily (save by a method to be presently examined) be undermined. When an attack is made upon them, whether by executive acts violating their provisions, or by the passing of statutes inconsistent with those provisions, such an attack can hardly escape observation. It is a plain notice to the defenders of the constitution to rally and to stir up the people by showing the mischief of an insidious. change. The principles on which the government rests, being set forth in a broad and simple form, obtain a hold upon the mind of the community, which, if it has been accustomed to give those principles a general approval, will be unwilling to see them tampered with. Moreover the process prescribed for amendment interposes various delays and formalities before a change can be carried through, pending which the people can reconsider the issues involved, and recede, if they think fit, from projects that may have at first attracted them. Both in Switzerland and in the States of the American Union it has repeatedly happened that constitutional amendments prepared and approved by the legislature have been rejected by the people, not merely because the mass of the people are often more conservative than their representatives, or are less amenable to the pressure of particular 'interests' or sections of opinion, but because fuller discussion revealed objections whose weight had not been appreciated when the proposal first appeared. In these respects the Rigid Constitution has real elements of stability.

Nevertheless it may be really less stable than it appears, for there is in its rigidity an element of danger.

It has already been noted that a constitution of the Flexible type finds safety in the elasticity which enables it to be stretched to meet some passing emergency, and then to resume its prior shape, and that it may disarm revolution by meeting revolution halfway. This is just what the Rigid Constitution cannot do. It is constructed, if I may borrow a metaphor from mechanics, like an iron railway-bridge, built solidly to resist the greatest amount of pressure by wind or water that is likely to impinge upon it. If the materials are sound and the workmanship good, the bridge resists with apparent ease, and perhaps without showing signs of strain or displacement, up to the highest degree of pressure provided for. But when that degree has been passed, it may break suddenly and utterly to pieces, as the old Tay Bridge did under the storm of December, 1879. The fact that it is very strong and all knit tightly into one fabric, while enabling it to stand firm under small oscillations or disturbances, may aggravate great ones. For just as the whole bridge collapses together, so the Rigid Constitution, which has arrested various proposed changes, may be overthrown by a popular tempest which has gathered strength from the very fact that such changes were not and under the actual conditions of politics could not be made by way of amendment. When a party grows up clamouring for some reforms which can be effected only by changing the constitution, or when a question arises for dealing with which the constitution provides no means, then, if the constitution cannot be amended in the legal

way, because the legally prescribed majority cannot be obtained, the discontent that was debarred from any legal outlet may find vent in a revolution or a civil war. The history of the Slavery question in the United States illustrates this danger on so grand a scale that no other illustration is needed. The Constitution of 1787, while recognizing the existence of slavery, left sundry questions, and in particular that of the extension of slavery into new territories and States, unsettled. Thirty years later these matters became a cause of strife, and after another thirty years this strife became so acute as to threaten the peace of the country. Both parties claimed that the Constitution was on their side. Had there been no Constitution embodied in an instrument difficult of change, or had it been practicable to amend the Constitution, so that the majority in Congress could have had, at an earlier stage, a free hand in dealing with the question, it is possible-though no one can say that it is certain-that the War of Secession might have been averted. So much may at any rate be noted that the Constitution, which was intended to hold the whole nation together, failed to do. There might no doubt in any case have been armed strife, as there was in England under its Flexible Constitution in 1641. But it is at least equally probable that the slave-holding party, which saw its hold on the government slipping away, hardened its heart because it held that it was the true exponent of the Constitution, and because the Constitution made compromise more difficult than it need have been in a country possessing a fully sovereign legislature.

Two opposing tendencies are always at work in