when the body of men who acted as the King’s immediate advisers were spoken of as “Ministers” or “the Ministry”(10). This kind of silent, I might say stealthy, growth, has, without the help of any legislative enactment, produced that unwritten and conventional code of political rules which we speak of as the Constitution. This process I have spoken of as being characteristic of the days since the Revolution of 1688, as distinguished from earlier times. And so it undoubtedly is. At no earlier time have so many important changes in constitutional doctrine and practice won universal acceptance without being recorded in any written enactment. Yet this tendency of later times is, after all, only a further developement of a tendency which was at work from the beginning. It is simply another application of the Englishman’s love of precedent. The growth of the unwritten Constitution has much in common with the earlier growth of the unwritten Common Law. I have shown in earlier chapters that some of the most important principles of our earlier Constitution were established silently and by the power of precedent, without resting on any known written enactment. If we cannot show any Act of Parliament determining the relations in which the members of the Cabinet stand to the Crown, to the House of Commons, and to one another, neither can we show the Act of Parliament which decreed, in opposition to the practice of all other nations, that the children of the hereditary Peer should be simple Commoners. The real difference is that, in more settled times, when Law was fully supreme, it was found that many important practical changes might be made without formal changes in the Law. It was also found that there is a large class of political subjects which can be better dealt with in this way of tacit understandings than they can be in the shape of a formal enactment by Law. We practically understand what is meant by Ministers having or not having the confidence of the House of Commons; we practically recognise the cases in which, as not having the confidence of the House, they ought to resign office and the cases in which they may fairly appeal to the country by a dissolution of Parliament. But it would be utterly impossible to define such cases beforehand in the terms of an Act of Parliament. Or again, the Speaker of the House of Commons is an officer known to the Law. The Leader of the House of Commons is a person as well known to the House and the country, his functions are as well understood, as those of the Speaker himself. But of the Leader of the House of Commons the Law knows nothing. It would be hopeless to seek to define his duties in any legal form, and the House itself has, before now, shrunk from recognising the existence of such a person in any shape of which a Court of Law could take notice(11).