IN my two former chapters I have carried my brief sketch of the history of the English Constitution down to the great events of the seventeenth century. I chose that point as the end of my consecutive narrative, because the peculiar characteristic of the times which have followed has been that so many and such important practical changes have been made without any change in the written Law, without any re-enactment of the Law, without any fresh declaration of its meaning. The movements and revolutions of former times, as I have before said, seldom sought any acknowledged change in the Law, but rather its more distinct enactment, its more careful and honest administration. This was the general character of all the great steps in our political history, from the day when William of Normandy renewed the Laws of Eadward to the day when William of Orange gave his royal assent to the Bill of Rights. But, though each step in our progress took the shape, not of the creation of a new right, but of the firmer establishment of an old one, yet each step was marked by some formal and public act which stands enrolled among the landmarks of our progress. Some Charter was granted by the Sovereign, some Act of Parliament was passed by the Estates of the Realm, setting forth in legal form the nature and measure of the rights which it was sought to place on a firmer ground. Since the seventeenth century things have in this respect greatly altered. The work of legislation, of strictly constitutional legislation, has never ceased; a long succession of legislative enactments stand out as landmarks of political progress no less in more recent than in earlier times. But alongside of them there has also been a series of political changes, changes of no less moment than those which are recorded in the statute-book, which have been made without any legislative enactment whatever. A whole code of political maxims, universally acknowledged in theory, universally carried out in practice, has grown up, without leaving among the formal acts of our legislature any trace of the steps by which it grew. Up to the end of the seventeenth century, we may fairly say that no distinction could be drawn between the Constitution and the Law. The prerogative of the Crown, the privilege of Parliament, the liberty of the subject, might not always be clearly defined on every point. It has indeed been said that those three things were all of them things to which in their own nature no limit could be set. But all three were supposed to rest, if not on the direct words of the Statute Law, yet at least on that somewhat shadowy yet very practical creation, that mixture of genuine ancient traditions and of recent devices of lawyers, which is known to Englishmen as the Common Law. Any breach either of the rights of the Sovereign or of the rights of the subject was a legal offence, capable of legal definition and subjecting the offender to legal penalties. An act which could not be