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Finchden : a fortiori in this case ; for there the action [ 397 ] was maintained because the plaintiff was tenant of the land from which the suit was due , and here he is tenant of the manor where the chapel is . Neither can it be defended on the same ground as the protection to the occupation of the land itself . Still it may be allowable to an author writing in 1914 , though more than half blinded , as must be every critic of the age in which he lives , by the ignorance and the partialities of his own day , to remember that the present has its teaching no less than the past or the future . How comes it , then , that one who has neither title nor possession is so far favored ? The second object of this Introduction is to state and analyse the main constitutional ideas which may fairly be called new , either because they have come into existence during the last thirty years , or because ( what is much more frequently the case ) they have in England during that period begun to exert a new and noticeable influence . I yield to no man in my passion for the greatness , the strength , the glory , and the moral unity of the British Empire.1021 am one of the thousands of Englishmen who approved , and still approve , of the war in South Africa because it forbade secession . We should call it a contract , but it probably presented itself to the mind of Glanvill 's predecessors simply as a duty or obligation attached by law to a transaction which was directed to a different point ; just as the liability of a bailee , which is now treated as arising from his undertaking , was originally raised by the law out of the position in which he stood toward third persons . Politicians may have talked of it when it happened to suit their party interest , but to the mass of the people the idea of federation has always been , and I venture to assert at this moment is , unknown and all but incomprehensible . This appeal has made its appearance at every crisis in the history of England , and indeed no one has stated so forcibly as my friend Mr. Freeman himself the peculiarity of all English efforts to extend the liberties of the country , namely , that these attempts at innovation have always assumed the form of an appeal to preexisting rights . During the Palmerstonian era , at any rate , a few of such men each possessed an authority inside and outside the House which is hardly claimed by any member now-a-days who neither has nor is expected to obtain a seat in any Cabinet . 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 . But neither parliamentary government nor any form of constitution , either which has been invented or may be discovered , will ever of itself remove all or half the sufferings of human beings . In England democratic government has already given votes , if not precisely supreme power , to citizens who , partly because of the fairness and the regularity with which the law has been enforced for generations in Great Britain , hardly perceive the risk and ruin involved in a departure from the rule of law . At the present day students of the constitution wish neither to criticise , nor to venerate , but to understand ; and a professor whose duty it is to lecture on constitutional law , must feel that he is called upon to perform the part neither of a critic nor of an apologist , nor of an eulogist , but simply of an expounder ; his duty is neither to attack nor to defend the constitution , but simply to explain its laws . Cabinet which represented all shades of opinion would be a Ministry which could not act at all .