Michigan Historical Reprint Series

The Rise and Progress of the English Constitution ... Michigan Historical Reprint Series

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1858 edition. Excerpt: ...vacillations, and the delays which are inevitable when there are three or more legis lative councils. The facilities for corruption and intimidation by the sovereign or his ministers are also fearfully augmented; and it becomes an easy matter for an adroit and ambitious politician to gain an ascendancy in one weak House out of many, and thereby to destroy the general free action of the political body. It is useful to compare, in this respect, the primary institutions of our own country with the different forms assumed by the national assemblies of other European nations in early times. For example, we shall find in mediaeval Sweden four estates in four Houses; in mediaeval Spain and France, three estates in three Houses. And we shall find that of all the early free institutions of Europe, our own alone have been permanent. The division of our parliament into two Houses is foreshadowed in the distinction drawn by John's Charter between the great barons and the inferior tenants-in-chief; and the nature of the division which took place, when our parliament was fully constituted by the addition of borough members, has been most momentous for the liberty of England. If the representatives of the so popular in France. The bica-popular principle to insist ou meral system is called, by the the protection of a Legislature, advocates of democratic unity divided into two Houses." of power, an aristocratic insti-See Sir J. Mackintosh's tution. This is an utter mis Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 188. take. In reality, it is a truiy inferior military tenants-in-chief had been admitted to the chamber of the great barons, or if they had sat apart from the burgesses, the same violent distinctions of class and caste must have grown up in England, that have been so...