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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 . " Federalism has , no doubt , during the last thirty , or one may say fifty , years acquired a good deal of new prestige . The answer to this suggestion is that students who do not bear in mind the claim of Parliament to absolute sovereignty throughout the whole of the British Empire , will never understand the extent to which this sovereign power is on some occasions actually exerted outside the limits of the United Kingdom , nor , though this statement sounds paradoxical , will they understand the limits which , with the full assent , no less of English than of colonial statesmen , are in fact , as regards at any rate the Dominions , imposed upon the actual exercise of the theoretically limitless authority of Parliament . The conventions of the constitution , on the other hand , cannot be recorded in the statute-book , though they may be formally reduced to writing . But wills of land were only exceptionally allowed by custom until the reign of Henry VIII ., and as the main doctrines of conveyancing had been settled long before that time , we must look further back and to other sources for their explanation . If the Premier should advise the creation of five hundred Peers , the Chancery Division would not , we may be sure , grant an injunction to restrain their creation . Under a written , therefore , as under an unwritten constitution , we find in full existence the distinction between the law and the conventions of the constitution . Cf. Lyle v. Barker , 5 Binn . To the subject of Acts of Indemnity , however , we shall return in a later chapter.13 The point to be now noted is that such enactments being as it were the legalisation 13 See Chap . No French court has ever definitely pronounced a law passed by the French legislature invalid , nor , it is said , has any Belgian court ever pronounced invalid a law passed by the Belgian Parliament . The referendum , as I have dealt with it , cannot , be it always borne in mind , enforce any law to which at any rate the House of Commons has not consented . These advantages are surely not owing to the soil of this island , nor to the latitude in which it is placed ; but to the spirit of its laws , from which , through various means , the characteristic independence and industrious-ness of our nation have been derived . The time has come when the fact ought to be generally admitted that the amount of government , that is of coercion , of individuals or classes by the state , which is necessary to the welfare or even to the existence of a civilised community , cannot permanently co-exist with the effective belief that deference to public opinion is in all cases the sole or the necessary basis of a democracy . And when we turn to the history of those remedies for rent which sounded in contract , we find that they were so regarded .