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Introduction , as in the writing of every book which I have published , untold aid from suggestions made to me by a large number both of English and of foreign friends . Under this enactment the House of Lords may insist upon a delay of at least two years and one calendar month , and a powerful opposition in the House of Commons may lengthen this delay . Before attempting a direct answer to this inquiry it is well to point out that in two respects of considerable importance the relation of the Imperial Parliament22 to the self-governing colonies , whether called Dominions or not , has in no respect changed since 1884 . This does not mean that a body of English gentlemen will wish to be presided over by a rogue ; what it does mean is that they will come to desire a Speaker who is not a judge but is an honest partisan . These words are a true statement of patent facts , but it will on examination be found that the change during recent years in English opinion , and also in colonial opinion , with regard to the relation between England and the Dominions presents rather more comlexity than at first sight may be apparent41 to a casual reader of Mr. As-quith 's address . But this was equally well expressed in terms of the fiction employed . Historians in their devotion to the earliest phases of ascertainable history are infected with a love which , in the eyes of a lawyer , appears inordinate , for the germs of our institutions , and seem to care little about their later developments . 22 This term means what an English writer on our constitution would generally call simply " Parliament , " that is the Parliament of the United Kingdom . He , for example , has no objection , if properly paid for it , to work with men who are not members of any union . 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 . This renewed faith in the pre-eminent wisdom of the people has probably acquired new force from its congeniality with democratic sentiment . The truth of this assertion is proved by actual legislation , by the existence among some classes of a certain distrust both of the law and of the judges , and by a marked tendency towards the use of lawless methods for the attainment of social or political ends . No one can doubt the possibility , and even the high probability , that , for example , the cause of woman suffrage may , at the present moment , obtain more than half the votes of the House of Commons while it would not obtain as many as half the votes of the electorate . Nothing can be more pedantic , nothing more artificial , nothing more unhistorical , than the reasoning by which Coke induced or compelled James to forego the attempt to withdraw cases from the Courts for his Majesty 's personal determination.9 But no achievement of sound argument , or stroke of enlightened statesmanship , ever established a rule more essential to the very existence of the constitution than the principle enforced by the obstinacy and the fallacies of the great Chief-Justice . They forbade the existence of a common coinage ; they allowed any one canton to protect the financial interest of its citizens against competition by the inhabitants of every other canton . " Federalism has , no doubt , during the last thirty , or one may say fifty , years acquired a good deal of new prestige . In the treatises on the constitutional law of France produced by writers entitled to high respect will be found the advocacy of a new form of decentralisation termed decentralisation par service ,61 which seems to mean the giving to different departments of civil servants a certain kind of independence , e.g . 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 . Thus the eminent man who advocated the desirability of every opinion obtaining a hearing in the House of Commons , used on another occasion the following words : " It is an essential and integral feature of our policy that we shall go forward with the task of making the House of Commons not only the mouthpiece but the mirror of the national mind . No unbiased observer who derives pleasure from the welfare of his species , can fail to consider the long and uninterruptedly increasing prosperity of England as the most beautiful phsenomenon in the history of mankind . But , when every admission which the most ardent of Imperialists can ask for , is made of the benefits conferred in every quarter of the world upon the inhabitants of different countries , by the existence of England 's Imperial power , it is quite possible for a calm observer to doubt whether the so-called federalisation of the British Empire is an object which ought to be aimed at by the statesmen either of England or of the Dominions .