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the men who can control the party machine is the more formidable if we adopt the view propounded by the ablest of the critics of the Government of England , and hold with Lowell that party government has been for generations not the accident or the corruption but , so to speak , the very foundation of our constitutional system.117 The best way to measure the extent of a hardly recognised alteration in the working of parliamentary government in England is to note the way in which a system nominally unchanged worked in the days of Palmerston , i.e. from 1855 to 1865 , that is rather less than sixty years ago . Its object is to call attention to the fact that the rules which make up constitutional law , as the term is used in England , include two sets of principles or maxims of a totally distinct character . These inquires are , many of them , great and weighty ; but they are not inquiries which will ever be debated in the law courts . One singular fact closely connected with the influence in France of droit administratif deserves the notice of Englishmen . Take as countries which exhibit this state of feeling the United States , the English federated colonies , the Swiss Confederation , and the German Empire , and contrast with this special condition of opinion the deliberate rejection by all Italian patriots of federalism , which in the case of Italy presented many apparent advantages , and the failure of union between Sweden and Norway to produce any desire for unity or even for a continued political connection , though these Scandinavian lands differ little from each other in race , in religion , in language , or in their common interest to maintain their independence against neighbouring and powerful countries .