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[word=every | tag=DT]
Looking back to the early [ 376 ] procedure , it will be seen that of course only those in the same chain of title could even mediately get the benefit of a former owner 's warranty . / 4 / Where , then , was the line to be drawn between covenants that devolved only to successors , and those that went with the land ? It means the status or persona in regard to that land formerly sustained by another . Under the English constitution they have one point in common : they are none of them " laws " in the true sense of that word , for if any or all of them were broken , no court would take notice of their violation . But the authority of the House of Lords has been gravely diminished , whilst the authority of the House of Commons , or rather of the majority thereof during any one Parliament , has been immensely increased . And when we turn to the history of those remedies for rent which sounded in contract , we find that they were so regarded . It is a little difficult to see why this proposal should be called " decentralisation , " for that term has hitherto borne a very different meaning . To put the same thing in a somewhat different shape , " constitutional law , " as the expression is used in England , both by the public and by authoritative writers , consists of two elements . Nor is it easy to doubt that any fair system of proportional representation must increase the number of groups existing in Parliament , for the very object of Proportionalists is to ensure that every opinion which exists among an appreciable number of British electors shall have an amount of votes in Parliament proportionate to the number of votes it obtains among the electors . No Act of Parliament of any kind could be passed without the consent thereto both of the House of Lords and of the House of Commons . The period of now more than two centuries which has elapsed since what used to be called the " Glorious Revolution , " filled as those two centuries are with change and with growth , seems hardly to have attracted the attention of a writer whom lack , not of knowledge , but of will has alone prevented from sketching out the annals of our modern constitution . I venture to assure all my readers that this forgetfulness of England and by England I here mean the country known , and famous , as England before the legal creation either of Great Britain or of the United Kingdom is a fashion opposed both to common sense and to common justice , and , like all opposition to the nature of things , will ultimately come to nothing . Climates more propitious may impart more largely the mere enjoyments of existence ; but in no other region have the benefits that political institutions can confer been diffused over so extended a population ; nor have any people so well reconciled the discordant elements of wealth , order , and liberty . 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 . O'Connell for a very short time exhibited a tendency to substitute federalism for repeal . Till a time well within the memory of persons now living , it would have been very difficult to find any body of men or women who did not admit that , broadly speaking , a breach of the law of the land was also an act of immorality . This fact has made much impression on the political opinion both of England and of the United States . This refusal to look an obvious fact in the face is facilitated by the use of that most ambiguous phrase , " Home Rule all round . An extreme suffragette will say that this result is not a reductio ad absurdum . There must exist a right against the servient owner before there is a right against anybody else . The referendum is , in short , merely the dear recognition in its negative form of that sovereignty of the nation of which under a system of popular government every leading statesman admits the existence . It has enabled English and colonial statesmanship to create that combination of Imperial unity with something coming near to colonial independence which may ultimately turn out to be the salvation of the British Empire . My object in publishing the work is to provide students with a manual which may impress these leading principles on their minds , and thus may enable them to study with benefit in Blackstone 's Commentaries and other treatises of the like nature those legal topics which , taken together , make up the constitutional law of England . The truth of this assertion is proved by actual legislation , by the existence among some classes of a certain distrust both of the law and of the judges , and by a marked tendency towards the use of lawless methods for the attainment of social or political ends . General Scott and General Lee alike had been trained as officers of the American Army ; each was a Virginian ; each of them was determined from the outbreak of the Civil War to follow the dictates of his own conscience ; each was placed in a position as painful as could be occupied by a soldier of bravery and honour ; each was a victim of that double allegiance which is all but inherent in federalism .