THE AMERICAN LAW REVIEW. SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER, 1914. THE LAW OF THE LAND.* In an interesting and instructive course of lectures on the "Law of the Constitution," delivered at Oxford by A. V. Dicey, Vinerian Professor of English Law, he begins with the two following quotations, which I believe have pertinence to the subject under consideration: “Great critics,' writes Burke, in 1791, 'have taught us one essential rule. . . . It is this, that if ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil, for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, we should rather believe that we are ourselves dull, than the rest of the world has been imposed on. It is as good a rule, at least, with regard to this admired constitution (of England). We ought to understand it according to our measure, and to venerate where we are not able presently to comprehend.' "No unbiased observer,' writes Hallam, in 1818, '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 phenomenon in the history of mankind. Climates more propitious may impart more largely the mere enjoyments of existence; but in no other region have the benefits that political institutions can confer been diffused over so extended a population; nor have any people so well reconciled the discordant elements of wealth, order and liberty. 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 industriousness of our nation have been derived. The constitution, therefore, of *Delivered before the Law Department of the University of Missouri, April 19, 1914. 41. VOL. XLVIII. (641) England must be to inquisitive men of all countries, far more to ourselves, an object of superior interest; distinguished, especially, as it is from all free government of powerful nations, which history has recorded, by its manifesting, after the lapse of several centuries, not merely no symptom of irretrievable decay, but a more expansive energy.'" Dr. Dicey then shortly proceeds to speak of the reverence for the institutions of their country by the fathers and grandfathers that preceded his time: "It was to them not a mere polity to be compared with the government of any other state, but so to speak a sacred mystery of statesmanship; it had (as we have all heard from our youth up) not been made but had grown;' it was the fruit not of abstract theory but of that instinct which (it is supposed) has enabled Englishmen, and especially uncivilized Englishmen, to build up sound and lasting institutions, much as bees construct a honeycomb, without undergoing the degradation of understanding the principles on which they raise a fabric more subtilely wrought than any work of conscious art. 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 civilized 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.'" Great and inspiring as the Constitutional History of England is, and great and transcendently valuable as those broad maxims of human liberty and human rights are, which we have acquired from it, cannot we, with more than equal enthusiasm, regard the fundamental theory of our constitutional structure? Cannot we voice "the fervent complacency of Hallam, natural as it was to an Englishman, who saw the institutions of England standing and flourishing at a time when the attempts of foreign reformers to combine freedom with order, had ended in ruin”?1 Cannot we with confidence assert that after years of war for independence, followed by years of discipline in 1 Dicey, Law of the Constitution, page 3. |