the name of the king, but under the ultimate control of Parliament at Westminster, which in 1719 asserted its full power to make statutes binding on the Irish people.

After a hundred years of political and economic prostration, the Irish nation found a favorable opportunity to reassert its claims to autonomy. About 1780, when England was at bay, with most of Europe hostile or actually in arms against her, and with the best of her colonial dominions about to slip from her grasp, the eloquent Henry Grattan put himself at the head of a movement designed to break the power of the English Parliament in Irish affairs; and in 1782 a law was passed at Westminster superseding Poynings's statute and granting that thenceforth the Irish people should be bound only by laws passed by the king and the parliament of Ireland. Although loudly acclaimed, this legislation yielded no great advantage. Catholics were admitted to the franchise only in 1793, and they never became eligible to membership; hence the parliament was essentially English rather than Irish. Besides, while reasonably independent in law-making, the body had no control whatever over the English-appointed executive. There was some helpful legislation; but the uneducated masses were disappointed, and, played upon by French influence, they broke into open rebellion in 1798.

The suppression of the insurrection was followed by one of the most important events in Irish history, namely, the establishment of a legislative union with Great Britain. The considerations that led the government of the younger Pitt to decide upon this step were, chiefly: (1) locked in deadly combat with one of the most powerful continental foes she had ever encountered, Britain must consolidate her resources, and, in particular, must draw under close control the region which was furnishing a base for the enemy's flank attack; (2) Grattan's parliament had not made much headway toward a betterment of conditions in the island; and (3) reasonable concessions would be more likely to be made and the longstanding difficulties removed by merging Ireland into a union with Great Britain, as Scotland had formerly been joined with England.

Hence, an Act of Union creating the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland " was drawn up and presented to the two parliaments. Opinion in Ireland was decidedly hostile, and it was only by open and wholesale bribery that the bill was got through at Dublin, in February, 1800. The British parliament passed it five months later, and on January 1, 1801, the

measure took effect. The Irish parliament was now abolished, and it was arranged that Ireland should be represented in the common Parliament by four spiritual lords and twenty-eight temporal peers, chosen by the Irish peerage for life, and by one hundred members (sixty-four sitting for counties, thirty-five for boroughs, and one for the University of Dublin) of the House of Commons. The Anglican Church of Ireland was merged with the established Church of England, under the name of the United Church of England and Ireland, although less than one fifth of the inhabitants of the island were adherents of it. Customs duties between the two countries were to be gradually abolished; for twenty years contributions to revenue by the two were to be in the proportion of fifteen to two; and all laws in both were to remain in force until repealed. The union was in the nature of a contract, and while the Church was disestablished in 1869 and one or two other changes were made, in the main the arrangement stood intact until 1914, when, as a result of many decades of agitation and controversy, a Home Rule Act sought to turn back the pages of history and restore to Ireland a separate parliament. The Great War caused this measure, as soon as passed, to be suspended; and at the date of writing (May, 1920) it does not yet appear whether it, or a substitute for it, will finally be put into operation.1

1 See p. 321. An abridgment of the text of the Act of Union with Scotland is printed in Adams and Stephens, Select Documents, 479-483; of that of the Act of Union with Ireland, ibid., 497–506. The full text of the former will be found in Robertson, Select Statutes, Cases, and Documents, 92-105; that of the latter, ibid., 157-164. On Ireland before the Union see May and Holland, Constitutional History of England, II, Chap. xvi, and E. R. Turner, Ireland and England (New York, 1919), Chaps. iii-vi. A trustworthy account of the events leading to the Act of Union is J. R. Fisher, The End of the Irish Parliament (London, 1911). See also references on p. 285 below.

CHAPTER IV

THE CONSTITUTION AND THE GOVERNMENT

What Constitution Means in England. Writers on government use the term "constitution " in two widely differing senses. Sometimes they mean by it a written instrument of fundamental law which outlines the structure of a governmental system, defines the powers of the governing bodies and officers, enumerates and guarantees the rights of citizens, and perhaps lays down certain general principles and rules to be observed in carrying on the affairs of state. The document may have been framed by a special, constituent assembly, or drafted by an ordinary legislative body, or promulgated upon the sole authority of a prince or dictator. On the other hand, the writer may employ the term to denote the whole body of laws, customs, and precedents, only partially, or even not at all, committed to writing, which determine the organization and workings of a government. The two usages are equally correct, provided one makes clear which is being followed at any given time. Thus the constitution of the United States is the document drawn up at Philadelphia in 1787 and put into operation in 1789, plus the eighteen amendments adopted in subsequent years; it is this instrument taken in conjunction with a great mass of rules, laws, customs, and interpretations, which lose none of their importance, or even of their binding character, because no mention of them can be found in the fundamental document.1 Upwards of a century ago a scholarly French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville author of a valuable work on democracy in America was led to remark that there is no such thing as an English constitution.2 As a Frenchman, he was accustomed to

or

1 The nature, classes, and modes of growth of constitutions are adequately discussed in J. W. Garner, Introduction to Political Science (New York, 1910), Chap. xii, and W. F. Willoughby, Government of Modern States (New York, 1919), Chaps. vi-vii.

2De la démocratie en Amérique, published at Paris in 1835. "In England," he says, "the Parliament has an acknowledged right to modify the constitution; as, therefore, the constitution may undergo perpetual changes, it does not in reality exist (elle n'existe point); the Parliament is at once a legislative and a constituent assembly." Euvres Complètes, I, 166–167.

consider a constitution as being necessarily a document, or at all events a group of documents, framed and adopted at a given time, and by some convention or other special agency, and setting forth in logical array the framework and principles of the government operating under it. In England he could find nothing of this sort; nor can one do so to-day. There is, however, it need hardly be affirmed, an English constitution - one which is at once the oldest and the most influential of all constitutions of our time. It is not contained in any single document, or in a group of documents; a great, although diminishing, portion of it is not in written form at all; it is not the work of any special constitution-framing body or power; far from being adopted at any one time, it is a product of fifteen centuries of political growth, and much of it was never formally "adopted at all. In short, the term "constitution" as applied to England must always be used in the broader sense indicated above. The English constitution is a complex of elements which one could hope to bring together only by examining intensively a thousand years and more of history, by laying hold of a statute here and of a judicial decision there, by taking constant account of the rise and crystallization of political usages, and by probing to their inmost recesses the mechanisms of administration, law-making, taxation, elections, and judicial procedure as they have been, and as they are actually operated before the spectator's eyes.

Component Elements: the Law of the Constitution. These elements have been classified in various ways. For purposes of brief enumeration they may be gathered into five main categories. In the first place, there are treaties and other international agreements, which in Great Britain as in the United States, are considered parts of the supreme law of the land. In the second place, there is a group of solemn engagements which have been entered into at times of national crisis between parties representing conflicting political forces. Of such character are the Great Charter, the Petition of Right, and the Bill of Rights. A third and larger category comprises parliamentary statutes of such character and importance as to add to or modify governmental powers or procedure. Statutes of this type obviously include the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, the Act of Settlement of 1701, the Septennial Act of 1716, Fox's Libel Act of 1792, the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884, the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, the Parliamentary and Municipal Elections Act of 1872, the Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894, the Parliament

Act of 1911, and the Representation of the People Act of 1918. In the fourth place there is the common law, a vast body of legal precept and usage which through the centuries has acquired binding and almost immutable character.1 The first three elements mentioned, i.e., treaties, solemn political engagements, and statutes, exist solely, or almost so, in written form. The rules of the common law, however, have not been reduced to writing, save in so far as they are contained in reports, legal opinions, and, more particularly, formal decisions of the courts, such as those on the rights of jurymen, on the prerogative of the crown, on the privileges of the houses of Parliament and of their members, and on the rights and duties of the police.

Component Elements: the Conventions of the Constitution. Finally, there are those portions of the constitution which have been aptly termed by Professor Dicey " the conventions." 2 The 99 law of the constitution, composed of the four elements that have been enumerated, is at all points, whether written or unwritten, enforceable by the courts; the conventions, although they may, and not seldom do, relate to matters of the most vital importance, are not so enforceable. The conventions consist of understandings, practices, and habits which alone regulate a large proportion of the actual relations and operations of the public authorities. They may somewhere be described in writing, but they do not appear in the statute books or in any instrument which can be made the basis of action in a court of law. For example, it is a convention of the constitution that forbids the king to veto a measure passed by the houses of Parliament. If the sovereign were in these days actually to veto a bill, the political consequences might be serious, but there could be no question of the technical legality of the deed. It is by virtue of a convention, not a law, of the constitution, that ministers resign when they have ceased to command the confidence of the House of Commons; that a bill must be read three times before being finally voted upon; that Parliament is convened annually, and that it consists of two houses. The cabinet, and all that the cabinet, as such, stands for, rests entirely upon convention. Obviously, any one seeking to understand the constitutional system as it is and as it operates must fix his attention upon the conventions quite as intently as upon the positive rules of law.3 1 See p. 207.

2 Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (8th ed.), Chap. xiv. 3 Convention occupies a large place in most political systems, even in countries which are governed under elaborate written constitutions. Their importance in the government of the United States is familiar. (See Bryce, American Common