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There are laws of the constitution , as , for example , the Bill of Rights , the Act of Settlement , and Habeas Corpus Acts , which are " written law , " found in the statute-books in other words , are statutory enactments . They certainly did not display any marked desire to secede from the Empire . It is also certain that during the nineteenth century there has been a notable tendency in English public life to produce in the House of Commons separate groups or parties which stood more or less apart from Tories and Whigs , and were all but wholly devoted to the attainment of some one definite change or reform . Mr. Gardiner 's History of 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 . This novel phenomenon , which perplexes moralists and statesmen , is that large classes of otherwise respectable persons now hold the belief and act on the conviction that it is not only allowable , but even highly praiseworthy , to break the law of the land if the law-breaker is pursuing some end which to him or to her seems to be just and desirable . There are other most important laws of the constitution ( several of which have already been mentioned ) which are " unwritten " laws , that is , not statutory enactments . It must again be remembered that the Lords , of recent years at least , have at times rejected Bills supported by the majority of the House of Commons which , as has been proved by the event , had not received the support of the electors . It is further a difference which may exist in countries which have a written or statutory constitution.16 In the United States the legal powers of the President , the Senate , the mode of electing the President , and the like , are , as far as the law is concerned , regulated wholly by the law of the constitution . The ancient veneration for the rule of law has in England suffered during the last thirty years a marked decline . These words are a true statement of patent facts , but it will on examination be found that the change during recent years in English opinion , and also in colonial opinion , with regard to the relation between England and the Dominions presents rather more comlexity than at first sight may be apparent41 to a casual reader of Mr. As-quith 's address . The 670 members of the House of Commons together with the 600 and odd members of the House of Lords112 contain a far greater proportion of educated men endowed with marked intellectual power and trained in the exercise of some high political virtues than would generally be found among , say , 1270 electors collected merely by chance from an electorate of more man 8,000,000 . This fact has in recent days become so patent that eminent thinkers are to be found who certainly use language which implies that the authority or the sovereignty of the nation , or even the conception of the national will , is a sort of political or metaphysical fiction which wise men will do well to discard . 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 . Recent Acts have given judicial or quasi-judicial authority to officials46 who stand more or less in connection with , and therefore may be influenced by , the government of the day , and hence have in some cases excluded , and in others indirectly diminished , the authority of the law Courts .