of the Crown, not in favour of the rights of the people. Indeed the whole ideal conception of the Sovereign, as one, personally at least, above the Law, as one personally irresponsible and incapable of doing wrong, the whole conception of the Sovereign as the sole fountain of all honour, as the original grantor of all property, as the source from which all authority of every kind issues in the first instance, is purely a lawyer’s conception, and rests upon no ground whatever in the records of our early history(13). In later times indeed the evil has largely corrected itself; the growth of our unwritten Constitution under the hands of statesmen has done much practically to get rid of these slavish devices of lawyers. The personal irresponsibility of the Sovereign becomes practically harmless when the powers of the Crown are really exercised by Ministers who act under a twofold responsibility, both to the written Law and to the unwritten Constitution. Yet even now small cases of hardship sometimes happen in which some traditional maxim of lawyers, some device devised in favour of the prerogative of the Crown, stands in the way of the perfectly equal administration of justice. But in several important cases the lawgiver has directly stepped in to wipe out the inventions of the lawyer, and modern Acts of Parliament have brought things back to the simpler principles of our earliest forefathers. I will wind up my sketch of our constitutional history by pointing out several cases in which this happy result has taken place.