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The constitution was marked by more than one transcendent quality which in the eyes of our fathers raised it far above the imitations , counterfeits , or , parodies , which have been set up during the last hundred years throughout the civilised world ; no precise date could be named as the day of its birth ; no definite body of persons could claim to be its creators , no one could point to the document which contained its clauses ; it was in short a thing by itself , which Englishmen and foreigners alike should " venerate , where they are not able presently to comprehend . In furtherance of this design I have not only emphasised the doctrines ( such , for example , as the sovereignty of Parliament ) which are the foundation of the existing constitution , but have also constantly illustrated English constitutionalism by comparisons between it and the constitutionalism on the one hand of the United States , and on the other of the French Republic . 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 . Now , that the existence of two leading parties , and of two such parties only , in England has favoured the development of English constitutionalism is past denial . Depreciation of , or contempt for , representative legislatures dearly exists under the parliamentary and republican government of France , under the federal and republican constitution of the Swiss Confederacy , or of the United States , under the essential militarism and the superficial parliamentarism of the German Empire , and even under the monarchical and historical constitutionalism of the British Empire . To the friendship of the late Sir William Anson I owe a debt the amount of which it is impossible to exaggerate . This argument may best be put in its full strength if it be placed , as it often is , in the form of a question : Was it reasonable that Florence Nightingale should not have possessed the right to vote for a member of Parliament when even in her day her footman or her coachman , if he had happened to be a ten-pound householder , or a forty-shilling freeholder , might have exercised a right denied to a lady who , as appears from her biography , possessed many statesmanlike qualities , who did in fact in some lines of action exert more political power than most M.P.s , and who always exercised power disinterestedly , and generally exercised it with admitted benefit to the country ? It is now a matter of course that the buyer stands in the shoes of the seller , or , in the language of an old law-book , / 3 / that " the assign is in a manner quasi successor to his assignor .