PREFACE. THIS book is (as its title imports) an introductio study of the law of the constitution; it does not to be even a summary, much less a complete of constitutional law. It deals only with two d guiding principles which pervade the modern cons of England. My object in publishing the work is to students with a manual which may impress these principles on their minds, and thus may enable t study with benefit in Blackstone's Commentaries an treatises of the like nature those legal topics which together make up the constitutional law of Engla furtherance of this design I have not only emphasi doctrines (such for example as the sovereignty of Parl which are the foundation of the existing constituti have also constantly illustrated English constituti by comparisons between it and the constitutionalism one hand of the United States, and on the other French Republic. Whether I have in any measure a my object must be left to the judgment of my read may perhaps be allowable to remind them that consisting of actually delivered lectures must, even revised for publication, exhibit the characterist separable from oral exposition, and that a treat the principles of the law of the constitution differs scope and purpose, as well from a constitutional his England as from works like Bagehot's incomparable Constitution, which analyse the practical working of our complicated system of modern Parliamentary government. If however I insist on the fact that my book has a special aim of its own, nothing is further from my intention than to underrate the debt which I owe to the labours of the lawyers and historians who have composed works on the English constitution. Not a page of my lectures could have been written without constant reference to writers such as Elackstone, Hallam, Hearn, Gardiner, or Freeman, whose books are in the hands of every student. To three of these authors in particular I am so deeply indebted that it is a duty no less than a pleasure to make special acknowledgment of the extent of my obligations. Professor Hearn's Government of England has taught me more than any other single work of the way in which the labours of lawyers established in early times the elementary principles which form the basis of the constitution. Mr. Gardiner's History f England has suggested to me the conclusion on which, confirmed as I found it to be by all the information I could collect about French administrative law, stress is frequently laid in the course of the following pages, that the views of the prerogative maintained by Crown lawyers under the Tudors and the Stuarts bear a marked resemblance to the legal and administrative ideas which at the present day under the Third Republic still support the droit administratif of France. To my friend and colleague Mr. Freeman I owe a debt of a somewhat different nature. His Growth of the English Constitution has been to me a model (far easier to admire than to imitate) of the mode in which dry and even abstruse topics may be made the subject of effective and popular exposition. The clear statement which that work contains of the difference A ! between our so-called "written law" and "our conve constitution" originally led me to seek for an ans the enquiry what may be the true source whence co tional understandings which are not laws derive binding power, whilst the equally vigorous stat contained in the same book of the aspect in whi growth of the constitution presents itself to an his forced upon my attention the essential difference b the historical and the legal way of regarding our i tions, and compelled me to consider whether the h looking too exclusively at the steps by which the co tion has been developed does not prevent student paying sufficient attention to the law of the const as it now actually exists. The possible weakness rate of the historical method as applied to the gro institutions, is that it may induce men to think so n the way in which an institution has come to be wh that they cease to consider with sufficient care v is that an institution has become. A. V. DI ALL SOULS College, |