During a time then which is now not very far short of two hundred years, the silent and extra-legal growth of our conventional Constitution has been at least as important as the actual changes in our written Law. With regard to these last, the point on which I wish chiefly to dwell is the way in which not a few pieces of modern legislation have been—whether wittingly or unwittingly I do not profess to know—a return to the simpler principles of our oldest constitution. I trust to show that, in many important points, we have cast aside the legal subtleties which grew up from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, and that we have gone back to the plain common sense of the eleventh or tenth, and of times far earlier still. In those ancient times we had already laws, but we had as yet no lawyers. We hear in early times of men who were versed above others in the laws of the land; but such special knowledge is spoken of as the attribute of age or of experience in public business, not as the private possession of a professional class(12). The class of professional lawyers grew up along with the growth of a more complicated and technical jurisprudence under our Norman and Angevin Kings. Now I mean no disrespect to a profession which in our present artificial state of society we certainly cannot do without, but there can be no kind of doubt that lawyers’ interpretations and lawyers’ ways of looking at things have done no small mischief, not only to the true understanding of our history but to the actual course of our history itself. The lawyer’s tendency is to carry to an unreasonable extent that English love of precedent which, within reasonable bounds, is one of our most precious safeguards. His virtue is that of acute and logical inference from given premisses; the premisses themselves he is commonly satisfied to take without examination from those who have gone before him. It is often wonderful to see the amazing ingenuity with which lawyers have piled together inference upon inference, starting from some purely arbitrary assumption of their own. Each stage of the argument, taken by itself, is absolutely unanswerable; the objection must be taken earlier, before the argument begins. The argument is perfect, if we only admit the premisses; the only unlucky thing is that the premisses will constantly be found to be historically worthless. Add to this that the natural tendency of the legal mind is to conservatism and deference to authority. This will always be the case, even with thoroughly honest men in an age when honesty is no longer dangerous. But this tendency will have tenfold force in times when an honest setting forth of the Law might expose its author to the disfavour of an arbitrary government. We shall therefore find that the premisses from which lawyers’ arguments have started, but which historical study shows to be unsound, are commonly premisses devised in favour of the prerogative