wise or beneficial to the nation, and that therefore, according to a conventional code as well understood and as effectual as the written Law itself, they were bound to resign offices of which the House of Commons no longer held them to be worthy. The House made no claim to dismiss those Ministers from their offices by any act of its own; it did not even petition the Crown to remove them from their offices. It simply spoke its mind on their general conduct, and it was held that, when the House had so spoken, it was their duty to give way without any formal petition, without any formal command, on the part either of the House or of the Sovereign(2). The passing by the House of Commons of such a resolution as this may perhaps be set down as the formal declaration of a constitutional principle. But though a formal declaration, it was not a legal declaration. It created a precedent for the practical guidance of future Ministers and future Parliaments, but it neither changed the Law nor declared it. It asserted a principle which might be appealed to in future debates in the House of Commons, but it asserted no principle which could be taken any notice of by a Judge in any Court of Law. It stands therefore on a wholly different ground from those enactments which, whether they changed the Law or simply declared the Law, had a real legal force, capable of being enforced by a legal tribunal. If any officer of the Crown should levy a tax without the authority of Parliament, if he should enforce martial law without the authority of Parliament, he would be guilty of a legal crime. But, if he merely continues to hold an office conferred by the Crown and from which the Crown has not removed him, though he hold it in the teeth of any number of votes of censure passed by both Houses of Parliament, he is in no way a breaker of the written Law. But the man who should so act would be universally held to have trampled under foot one of the most undoubted principles of the unwritten but universally accepted Constitution.