Page:Studies in constitutional law Fr-En-US (1891).pdf/20

6 starting with an axiom as a heading; they are all works of art and logic.

The French are accustomed to see nothing but the advantages of this system, and they are evident. The English have chiefly felt its inconveniences and dangers. Probably they have been influenced by two facts: first, that to publish a clear, methodical, and analytical work for all readers would be to invite perpetual competition in producing an improved version, to make one’s self amenable to logic, to a tribunal from which the right of appeal is indefinite; secondly, that every systematic construction is tantamount to a promise to produce something complete and perfect which shall provide for and guard against every contingency, and this is to attempt an impossibility, so that the energy wanted to make such a Constitution, and the enthusiasm which it excites when first made, are only equalled by the cruel disappointments which follow as soon as it is put in force. So the English have left the different parts of their Constitution just where the wave of history had deposited them; they have not attempted to bring them together, to classify or complete them, or to make a consistent and coherent whole.

This scattered Constitution gives no hold to sifters of texts and seekers after difficulties. It need not fear critics anxious to point out an omission, or theorists ready to denounce an antinomy. The necessities of politics are so complex; so many different interests are mixed up in them, so many opposing forces run counter to each other, that it is impossible to get together all the essential elements of a stable fabric and put them