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But the mere consonance of a given arrangement with some received doctrine , such as " the sovereignty of the people , " must with a thoughtful man carry little weight , except in so far as this harmony with prevalent ideas promises permanence to some suggested reform or beneficial institution . These facts may rekindle among the youth of England as of France the sense that to be young is very heaven ; these facts may console old men whom political disillusion and disappointment which they deem undeserved may have tempted towards despair , and enable them to rejoice with calmness and gravity that they have lived long enough to see the day when the solemn call to the performance of a grave national duty has united every man and every class of our common country in the determination to defy the strength , the delusions , and the arrogance of a militarised nation , and at all costs to secure for the civilised world the triumph of freedom , of humanity , and of justice . During forty years faith in parliamentary government has suffered an extraordinary decline or , as some would say , a temporary eclipse.in This change is visible in every civilised country . countries which make up the British Empire , if he reflects that they are occupied by different races whose customs and whose civilisation are the product of absolutely different histories , that the different countries of the Empire are in no case contiguous , and in many instances are separated from England and from each other by seas extending over thousands of miles , he will rather wonder at the boldness of the dreams entertained by the votaries of federal Imperialism , than believe that the hopes of federalising the Empire are likely to meet with fulfilment . Our civil servants , indeed , are as yet not in any serious degree put beyond the control of the law Courts , but in certain instances , and notably with regard to many questions arising under the National Insurance Act , 1911 , something very like judicial powers have been given to officials closely connected with the Government.55 And it may not be an exaggeration to say that in some directions the law of England is being " officialised , " if the expression may be allowed , by statutes passed under the influence of socialistic ideas . 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 . Parliament , in the second place , had long before 1884 practically admitted the truth of the doctrine in vain pressed upon his contemporaries by Burke ,23 when insisting upon the folly of the attempt made by the Parliament of England to exert as much absolute power in Massachusetts as in Middlesex , that a real limit to the exercise of sovereignty is imposed not by the laws of man but by the nature of things , and that it was vain for a parliamentary or any other sovereign to try to exert equal power throughout the whole of an immense Empire . The issues further to be determined by the electors will year by year become , in the absence of the referendum , more complicated and confused . I venture to assure all my readers that this forgetfulness of England and by England I here mean the country known , and famous , as England before the legal creation either of Great Britain or of the United Kingdom is a fashion opposed both to common sense and to common justice , and , like all opposition to the nature of things , will ultimately come to nothing . / 2 / It is never necessary between covenantor and covenantee , or any other persons , except between the present owner and the original covenantee . In modern times , of course , such a requirement , if it should exist , would be purely formal , and would be of no importance except as an ear-mark by which to trace the history of a doctrine . That quickly fell apart with the partisan way President John Adams made judicial appointments during the last days of his administration after his party lost the election of 1800 , most notably of John Marshall as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court . The ancient veneration for the rule of law has in England suffered during the last thirty years a marked decline . After the Conquest we do not hear much of warranty , except in connection with land , and this fact will at once [ 372 ] account for its having had a different history from debt . " Federalism has , no doubt , during the last thirty , or one may say fifty , years acquired a good deal of new prestige . The possible weakness at any rate of the historical method as applied to the growth of institutions , is that it may induce men to think so much of the way in which an institution has come to be what it is , that they cease to consider with sufficient care what it is that an institution has become . It has been shown that a similar limitation of the benefits of the ancient [ 380 ] warranty was required by its earlier history before the assign was allowed to sue , and that the fiction by which he got that right could not extend it beyond that limit . Some further of the laws of the constitution , such , for example , as the law regulating the descent of the Crown , which were at one time unwritten or common law , have now become written or This difference will at bottom be found to depend upon the degree of directness with which the violation of a given constitutional maxim brings the wrongdoer into conflict with the law of the land . Only , as such covenants are rarely , if ever , made , except in leases , there is always privity to the original parties . Nor can it be urged that Blackstone 's description of the royal authority was a true account of the powers of the King at the time when Blackstone wrote . So again the veto of the Crown was , in one form or another27 in 1884 , and even later , used occasionally to prevent colonial legislation which , though approved of by the people of the colony and by the legislature thereof , might be opposed to the moral feeling or convictions of Englishmen .