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The usual reaction to proposals to select judges by some sortition process is that it would not result in selecting the most qualified persons for those positions , which require a high level of legal training and ability . 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 ? The period of now more than two centuries which has elapsed since what used to be called the " Glorious Revolution , " filled as those two centuries are with change and with growth , seems hardly to have attracted the attention of a writer whom lack , not of knowledge , but of will has alone prevented from sketching out the annals of our modern constitution . If the law should protect a possessor of land in the enjoyment of water coming to it , it would do so because the use of the water was regarded as a part of the enjoyment of that land , and would by no means imply that it would do the same in the case just put of a way over land of another . Nothing is more remarkable , and in the eyes of any impartial critic more praiseworthy , than the reverence paid on the whole by American opinion to the Supreme Court of the United States . Hence he could only summon those from whom his grantor derived his title . The best mode of giving an answer to this question is first to state broadly what were the legislative powers of the House of Lords immediately before the passing of the Parliament Act , i8th August 1911 , and next to state the main direct and indubitable effects of that Act on the legislative power of the House of Lords and of the House of Commons respectively . The one half of it should , as belonging to history , go over to our historical professors . Looking back to the early [ 376 ] procedure , it will be seen that of course only those in the same chain of title could even mediately get the benefit of a former owner 's warranty . It is probable , if not certain , that any one , who realises the extent to which parliamentary government itself is losing credit from its too close connection with the increasing power of the party machine , will hold with myself that the referendum judiciously used may , at any rate in the case of England , by checking the omnipotence of partisanship , revive faith in that parliamentary government which has been the glory of English constitutional history . Only those who were privy in estate with the person to whom the warranty was originally given , could vouch the original warrantor . Some have supposed this privity to be tenure ; some , an interest of the covenantee in the land of the covenantor ; and so on . 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 . Objections to the Third Proposition First Objection The more complicated any system of popular election is made , the more power is thrown into the hands of election 87 See Mr. Asquith 's speech at St. Andrews , Feb. 19 , 1906 , cited by J. Proportional Representation , p. 17 . This growth of the authority obtained by 116 Lowell , Government of England , chaps , xxiv-xxvii ., and especially i. pp . / 3 / But Lord Coke did not mean to lay down any sweeping doctrine , for his conclusion is , that " a covenant is in many cases extended further than the warrantie . Then , too , it is thought that whereas English statesmen find it difficult to regulate the relation between Great Britain and Ireland , the task will become easier if the same statesmen undertake to transform , by some hocus-pocus of political legerdemain , the whole United Kingdom into a federal government consisting of at least four different states . " This enactment , if strictly construed , would protect any Speaker who , either from partisanship or to promote some personal interest of his own , signed a certificate which was notoriously false from being liable to punishment by any Court of law whatever.50 No doubt the House of Commons has been historically jealous of any judicial interference with persons acting under the authority of the House , and has on more than one occasion claimed in a sense to be above the law of the land . A fair-minded man prepared to do this will , in the first place , admit that many democratic formulas , e.g . It is by no means obviously true ; it is open to the following ( among other ) objections that admit of dear statement .