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the men who can control the party machine is the more formidable if we adopt the view propounded by the ablest of the critics of the Government of England , and hold with Lowell that party government has been for generations not the accident or the corruption but , so to speak , the very foundation of our constitutional system.117 The best way to measure the extent of a hardly recognised alteration in the working of parliamentary government in England is to note the way in which a system nominally unchanged worked in the days of Palmerston , i.e. from 1855 to 1865 , that is rather less than sixty years ago . Once grasp the ambiguity latent in the expression " constitutional law , " and everything connected with the subject falls so completely into its right place that a lawyer , called upon to teach or to study constitutional law as a branch of the law of England , can hardly fail to see dearly the character and scope of his subject . It is quite possible honestly to regret the time when Edinburgh possessed the most intellectual society to be found in Great Britain or Ireland . Thus the Crown , or in other words a British ministry , will now not veto or disallow any Bill passed by the legislature of a Dominion on the ground that such Bill is indirectly opposed to the interests of the United Kingdom , or contradicts legal principles generally upheld in England , e.g . Professor of Jurisprudence , because it is his vocation to deal with the oddities or the outlying portions of legal science , or to my friend the Chichele Professor of International Law , because he being a teacher of law which is not law , and being accustomed to expound those rules of public ethics which are miscalled international law , will find himself at home in expounding political ethics which , on the hypothesis under consideration , are miscalled constitutional law . He supposes , that is to say , as a matter of course , that Englishmen will agree to a radical change in the government of England which no sane English Premier would have thought of pressing upon the Parliaments of the self-governing colonies which now constitute the Dominion of Canada or which now constitute the Commonwealth of Australia . If it be placed in the hands of judges , who profess and probably desire to practise judicial impartiality , it may be very difficult to ensure general respect for any decision which contradicts the interests and the principles of a dominant party . The general object of this Lecture is to discover the theory on which a man is allowed to enjoy a special right when the facts out of which the right arises are not true of him . No doubt the House of Lords did very rarely either alter or reject any Money Bill , and though the Lords have always claimed the right to alter or reject such a Bill , they have only on very special occasions exercised this power . In 1914 the self-government , e.g ., of New Zealand means absolute , unfettered , complete autonomy , without consulting English ideas of expediency or even of moral duty .