His natural, his inevitable resource is to recur to writers of authority on the law, the history, or the practice of the constitution. He will find (it must be admitted) no lack of distinguished guides; he may avail himself of the works of lawyers such as Blackstone, of the investigations of historians such as Hallam or Freeman, and of the speculations of philosophical theorists such as Bagehot or Hearn. From each class he may learn much, but for reasons which I am about to lay before you for consideration, he is liable to be led by each class of authors somewhat astray in his attempt to ascertain the field of his labours and the mode of working it; he will find, unless he can obtain some clue to guide his steps, that the whole province of so-called “constitutional law” is a sort of maze in which the wanderer is perplexed by unreality, by antiquarianism, and by conventionalism.
I. Lawyer’s view of constitution. Its unreality. Blackstone.
Let us turn first to the lawyers, and as in duty bound to Blackstone.
Of constitutional law as such there is not a word to be found in his Commentaries. The matters which appear to belong to it are dealt with by him in the main under the head Rights of Persons. The Book which is thus entitled treats (inter alia) of the Parliament, of the King and his title, of master and servant, of husband and wife, of parent and child. The arrangement is curious and certainly does not bring into view the true scope or character of constitutional law. This, however, is a trifle. The Book contains much real learning about our system of government. Its true defect is the hopeless confusion both of language and of thought, introduced into the whole subject of constitutional law by Blackstone’s habit—common to all the lawyers of his time—of applying old and inapplicable terms to new institutions,
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and especially of ascribing in words to a modern and constitutional King the whole, and perhaps more than the whole, of the powers actually possessed and exercised by William the Conqueror.
Blackstone writes:
We are next to consider those branches of the royal prerogative, which invest thus our sovereign lord, thus all-perfect and immortal in his kingly capacity, with a number of authorities and powers; in the exertion whereof consists the executive part of the government. This is wisely placed in a single hand by the British constitution, for the sake of unanimity, strength, and dispatch. Were it placed in many hands, it would be subject to many wills: many wills, if disunited and drawing different ways, create weakness in a government; and to unite those several wills, and reduce them to one, is a work of more time and delay than the exigencies of state will afford. The King of England is, therefore, not only the chief, but properly the sole, magistrate of the nation; all others acting by commission from, and in due subordination to him; in like manner as, upon the great revolution of the Roman state, all the powers of the ancient magistracy of the commonwealth were concentrated in the new Emperor: so that, as Gravina expresses it, in ejus unius persona veteris reipublicae vis atque majestas per cumulatas magistratuum potestates exprimebatur.5
The language to this passage is impressive; it stands curtailed but in substance unaltered in Stephen’s Commentaries. It has but one fault; the statements it contains are the direct opposite of the truth. The executive of England is in fact placed in the hands of a committee called the Cabinet. If there be any one person in whose single hand the power of the State is placed, that one person is not the King but the chairman of the committee, known as the Prime Minister. Nor can it be urged that Blackstone’s description of the royal authority was a true account of the powers of the King at the time when Blackstone wrote. George the Third enjoyed far more real authority than has fallen to the share of any of his descendants. But it would be absurd to maintain that the language I have cited painted his true position. The terms used by the commentator were, when he used them, unreal, and known6 to be so. They have become only a little more unreal during the century and more which has since elapsed.
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The King is considered in domestic affairs . . . as the fountain of justice, and general conservator of the peace of the kingdom. . . . He therefore has alone the right of erecting courts of judicature: for, though the constitution of the kingdom hath entrusted him with the whole executive power of the laws, it is impossible, as well as improper, that he should personally carry into execution this great and extensive trust: it is consequently necessary, that courts should be erected to assist him in executing this power; and equally necessary, that if erected, they should be erected by his authority. And hence it is, that all jurisdictions of courts are either mediately or immediately derived from the Crown, their proceedings run generally in the King’s name, they pass under his seal, and are executed by his officers.7
Here we are in the midst of unrealities or fictions. Neither the King nor the Executive has anything to do with erecting courts of justice. We should rightly conclude that the whole Cabinet had gone mad if to-morrow’s Gazette contained an order in council not authorised by statute erecting a new Court of Appeal. It is worth while here to note what is the true injury to the study of law produced by the tendency of Blackstone, and other less famous constitutionalists, to adhere to unreal expressions. The evil is not merely or mainly that these expressions exaggerate the power of the Crown. For such conventional exaggeration a reader could make allowance, as easily as we do for ceremonious terms of respect or of social courtesy. The harm wrought is, that unreal language obscures or conceals the true extent
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of the powers, both of the King and of the Government. No one, indeed, but a child, fancies that the King sits crowned on his throne at Westminster, and in his own person administers justice to his subjects. But the idea entertained by many educated men that an English King or Queen reigns without taking any part in the government of the country, is not less far from the truth than the notion that Edward VII. ever exercises judicial powers in what are called his Courts. The oddity of the thing is that to most Englishmen the extent of the authority actually exercised by the Crown—and the same remark applies (in a great measure) to the authority exercised by the Prime Minister, and other high officials—is a matter of conjecture. We have all learnt from Blackstone, and writers of the same class, to make such constant use of expressions which we know not to be strictly true to fact, that we cannot say for certain what is the exact relation between the facts of constitutional government and the more or less artificial phraseology under which they are concealed. Thus to say that the King appoints the Ministry is untrue; it is also, of course, untrue to say that he creates courts of justice; but these two untrue statements each bear a very different relation to actual facts. Moreover, of the powers ascribed to the Crown, some are in reality exercised by the Government, whilst others do not in truth belong either to the King or to the Ministry. The general result is that the true position of the Crown as also the true powers of the Government are concealed under the fictitious ascription to the sovereign of political omnipotence, and the reader of, say, the first Book of Blackstone, can hardly discern the facts of law with which it is filled under the unrealities of the language in which these facts find expression.
II. Historian’s view of constitution. Its antiquarianism.
Let us turn from the formalism of lawyers to the truthfulness of our constitutional historians.
Here a student or professor troubled about the nature of constitutional law finds himself surrounded by a crowd of eminent instructors. He may avail himself of the impartiality of Hallam: he may dive into the exhaustless erudition of the Bishop of Oxford: he will discover infinite parliamentary experience in the pages of Sir Thomas May, and vigorous common sense, combined with polemical research, in Mr. Freeman’s Growth of the English Constitution. Let us take this book as an excellent type of historical constitutionalism. The
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Growth of the English Constitution is known to every one. Of its recognised merits, of its clearness, of its accuracy, of its force, it were useless and impertinent to say much to students who know, or ought to know, every line of the book from beginning to end. One point, however, deserves especial notice. Mr. Freeman’s highest merit is his unrivalled faculty for bringing every matter under discussion