Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/483

447 HARVARD LAW REVIEW VOL. XXXII MARCH, 1919 NO. 5 THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE STATE IN ENGLAND TO ROSCOE POUND THE British Crown covers a multitude of sins. "The King," says Blackstone in a famous sentence,^ "is not only inca- pable of doing wrong, but even of thinking wrong; he can never mean to do an improper thing; in him is no folly or weakness." A long history Ues behind those amazing words; and if, as to New- man,^ they seem rather the occasion for irony than for serious polit- ical speculation, that is perhaps because their legal substance would have destroyed the argument he was anxious to make. In Eng- land, that vast abstraction we call the state has, at least in theory, no shadow even of existence; government, in the strictness of law, is a complex system of royal acts based, for the most part, upon the advice and consent of the Houses of Parliament. We tech- nically state our theory of politics in terms of an entity which has dignified influence without executive power. The King can do no wrong partly because, at a remote period of history, the place where alone the doing of wrong could best be righted was his place, and had won preeminence only after a long struggle with the courts of lesser lords. The King's courts became the supreme resort of justice simply because, in his hands, that commodity 1 I Com., 1813 ed., 254.
 * The Present Position of Catholics in England, 27/.