[Footnote 46: Styled "the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland."] [Footnote 47: 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. 16.] IV. THE NATURE AND SOURCES OF THE CONSTITUTION *41. The Elusiveness of the Constitution.*--The description of the British governmental system which is hereafter to be undertaken will be clarified by a word of comment at this point upon the character which the English constitution of to-day has assumed, upon the form in which it exists, and upon the sources from which it has been drawn. The term "constitution," as is familiarly understood, may be employed to denote a written instrument of fundamental law which has been framed by a constituent assembly, drafted by an ordinary legislative body, or promulgated upon the sole authority of a dictator or monarch; or, with equal propriety, it may be used to designate a body of (p. 042) customs, laws, and precedents, but partially, or even not at all, committed to writing, in accordance with which the machinery of a given governmental system is operated. The constitution of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is of this second type. The student who desires to bring together the principles and to tabulate the working details of the British constitutional order will find no single document, nor any collection of documents, in which these things are wholly, or even largely, set down. For the accomplishment of such a task it would be necessary to review intensively a thousand years and more of history, to lay hold of a statute here and of a judicial decision there, to take constant cognizance of the rise and crystallization of political usages, and to probe 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. Foremost among its compeers in antiquity, in comprehensiveness, and in originality, the British constitution is at once the least tangible and the most widely influential among European bodies of fundamental law.