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So the undoubted fact that a large number of Englishwomen desire parliamentary votes seems , in the eyes of many excellent persons , to give to Englishwomen a natural right to vote for members of Parliament . Covenants which started from the analogy of warranties , and others to which was applied the language and reasoning of easements , have been confounded together under the title of [ 401 ] covenants running with the land . 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 . Hence Bill after Bill has been passed by their lordships of which the House of Lords did not in reality approve . So a covenant to serve as apprentice in a trade , which the other party covenants to teach , can only be performed if the other will teach , and must therefore be limited to that event . We are now ready for a case / 5 / decided under Edward III ., which has been discussed from the time of Fitzherbert and Coke down to Lord St. Leonards and Mr. Rawle , which is still law , and is said to remain still unexplained . Western Australia , for instance , which is now one of the states of the Commonwealth of Australia , did not obtain responsible government till 1890 , and Natal , now a state of the Union of South Africa , did not obtain such government till 1893 . 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 . 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 . This is a matter of good omen for the happy development of popular government and for the progress , slow though it be , of mankind along the path of true fortitude and of real righteousness . Ministers who , after Supplies were voted and the Mutiny Act passed , should prorogue the House and keep office for months after the Government had ceased to retain the confidence of the Commons , might or might not incur grave unpopularity , but would not necessarily commit a breach of law . In England , which is after all by far the most important part of the kingdom , the idea of federalism has hitherto been totally unknown . So a disseisor , abator , intruder , or the lord by escheat , & c ., shall have them as things annexed to the land . The Repealers , as led by O'Connell , and still more the Free Traders , as led by Cobden91 are early examples of such 90 I choose these old expressions which have been in use , at any rate from 1689 till the present day , because they make it easier to keep somewhat apart from the burning controversies of 1914 . The Chief Justice , after suggesting the possibility of sufficient privity on the ground that the plaintiff was privy in blood and might be heir , turns to the other argument as more promising , and evidently founds his opinion upon it . 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 . These distinctions till nearly the middle of the nineteenth century produced a kind of disunion among the Swiss people which in 1914 seems almost incredible . To an Englishman who still holds , as was universally held by every English statesman till at the very earliest 1880 , that the union between England and Scotland was the wisest and most fortunate among the achievements of British statesmanship , there is great difficulty in understanding the new belief that the federalisation of the United Kingdom will confer benefit upon any of the inhabitants of Great Britain.106 A candid critic may be able to account for the existence of a political creed which he does not affect to share . As it is with the American lawyer compared with the American historian , so it is with the English lawyer as compared with the English historian . Gradual growth of the English constitution ; new laws seldom called for ; importance of precedent ; return to early principles in modern legislation ; shrinking up of the ancient national Assemblies ; constitution of the Witenagemot ; the Witenagemot continued in the House of Lords ; Gemots after the Norman Conquest ; the King 's right of summons ; Life Peerages ; origin of the House of Commons ; comparison of English and French national Assemblies ; of English and French history generally ; course of events influenced by particular men ; Simon of Montfort .