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The historian of the American Union would not commence his researches at the year 1789 ; he would have a good deal to say about Colonial history and about the institutions of England ; he might , for aught I know , find himself impelled to go back to the Witenagemot ; he would , one may suspect , pause in his researches considerably short of Uri . 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 . Throughout this Introduction , unless the contrary is expressly stated , or appears from the context , no reference is made to the position either of ( i. ) the Crown colonies , or ( ii . 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 . Little was heard about such rights during the great French Revolution . I refer to the warranty which arose upon the transfer of property . When we contemplate the theory of the British government , we see the King invested with the most absolute personal impunity ; with a power of rejecting laws , which have been resolved upon by both Houses of Parliament ; of conferring by his charter , upon any set or succession of men he pleases , the privilege of sending representatives into one House of Parliament , as by his immediate appointment he can place whom he will in the other . When one estate was said to be enslaved to another , or a right of way was said to be a quality or [ 383 ] incident of a neighboring piece of land , men 's minds were not alert to see that these phrases were only so many personifying metaphors , which explained nothing unless the figure of speech was true . The task imposed upon British and upon colonial statesmanship is one of infinite difficulty . The Parliament Act greatly increases the authority of the Speaker with respect to Bills to be passed under that Act. No Bill can be so passed unless he shall have time after time certified in writing under his hand , and signed by him that the provisions of the Parliament Act have been strictly followed . In the treatises on the constitutional law of France produced by writers entitled to high respect will be found the advocacy of a new form of decentralisation termed decentralisation par service ,61 which seems to mean the giving to different departments of civil servants a certain kind of independence , e.g . It did not pass to assigns unless assigns were mentioned . " / 1 / So it was said by Lord Ellenborough , in a case where a lessor and his heirs were entitled to terminate a lease on notice , that a devisee of the land as heres factus would be understood to have the same right . 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 . The one limit to this complete independence in regard to local government is that it is confined to really local matters and does not trench upon loyalty to the Empire . This condition , whether temporary or permanent , of public opinion greatly puzzles the now small body of surviving constitutionalists old enough to remember the sentiment of the mid-Victorian era , with its prevalent belief that to imitate the forms , or at any rate to adopt the spirit of the English constitution , was the best method whereby to confer upon the people of any civilised country the combined blessings of order and of progress . 22 This term means what an English writer on our constitution would generally call simply " Parliament , " that is the Parliament of the United Kingdom . / 2 / ( That is to say , such obligations follow the analogy of easements , and , as the burden falls on the quasi servient estate , the benefit goes with the dominant land to assigns , whether mentioned or not , and they are not considered from the point of view of contract at all .