Page:Studies in constitutional law Fr-En-US (1891).pdf/19

Rh the constitution of the House of Lords is the result of several different statutes dated respectively 1707, 1800, 1829, 1847, 1860, 1876, of an opinion of the judges in 1782 and of innumerable customs. The duration of Parliament is determined by two Acts, one of the time of George I., one of 1867, without counting the usage, in virtue of which about a year of the statutory time is curtailed. Publicists and jurists have taken the trouble to search out and compare these texts and to write down their decisions, and the legislator has left this work to them, for no legislator has ever stamped any methodical digest of the constitutional provisions with his authority.

This state of things is very far removed from the idea that the French have of a Constitution. For eighty years past French history shows us under this name one single document conceived all at once, promulgated on a given day, and embodying all the rights of government, and all the guarantees of liberty, in a series of connected chapters. Such are notably the French Constitutions of the revolutionary period from which all the rest take their form and origin; they are like mathematical demonstrations or scientific classifications