My own years of residence in the United States have convinced me that there is a real value in Bills of Rights which it is both easy, and mistaken, to under-estimate. Granted that the people are educated to the appreciation of their purpose, they serve to draw attention, as attention needs to be drawn, to the fact that vigilance is essential in the realm of what Cromwell called fundamentals. Bills of Rights are, quite undoubtedly, a check upon possible excess in the government of the day. They warn us that certain popular powers have had to be fought for, and may have to be fought for again. The solemnity they embody serves to set the people on their guard. It acts as a rallying-point in the state for all who care deeply for the ideals of freedom. I believe, for instance, that the existence of the First Amendment has drawn innumerable American citizens to defend freedom of speech who have no atom of sympathy with the purposes for which it is used. A Bill of Rights, so to say, canonizes the safeguards of freedom; and, thereby, it persuades men to worship at the altar who might not otherwise note its existence. All this, I think, is true; but it does not for a moment imply that a Bill of Rights is an automatic guarantee of liberty. For the relationship of legislation to its substance has to be measured by the judiciary. Its members, after all, are human beings, likely, as the rest of us, to be swept off their feet by gusts of popular passion. The first Amendment to the American Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and peaceable assembly; the fourth Amendment legally secures to the citizen that his house shall not be searched except upon a warrant of probable cause; the eighth Amendment legally secures him against excessive bail. Yet you will remember how, in one hysterical week in 1919, the action of the executive power rendered all these amendments worthless;[16] and you will not forget that the fifteenth Amendment, which sought political freedom for the coloured citizens of the South, has never been effectively applied either by the executive or by the Courts.