legislation. To change it, or recast it, requires a revolution. Such a revolution may not be accompanied by bloodshedding, or it may, but it is certainly accompanied by insecurity and unsettlement.
It should, therefore, be the business of constitution-makers to prescribe only what to them is fundamental and irrefutable; to lay down the secure foundations of their "State; and to leave all other matters to the experience of the nation, without seeking to shackle that experience by .provisions that time may not commend. Otherwise, a convulsion may be necessary to get done what ordinary legislation could have accomplished without affecting the stability of the State.
This, then, is the first definition of a Constitution, that it contains the Fundamental Law of a State, and only the Fundamental Law. In England there is no such thing as a Fundamental Law. It is claimed by English constitutional lawyers that this is because Parliament is sovereign; but the historical truth is that in England Parliament exercises a sovereignty in fact which the King is supposed to exercise in theory; and any attempt to make the theory square with the fact by the writing of a Fundamental Law; would lead, perhaps, to a surprising situation.
Yet in England certain fundamental rights are recognised, with which Parliament would not lightly tamper; and these amount,in effect to a Fundamental Law, holding a higher rank than ordinary laws. In practically all other countries such rights are set forth in a document, different from all other legal documents, inasmuch as unless these other documents observe the conditions required in the first, and do not conflict with its provisions, they are null and void. In both sets of documents the laws of the realm are to be found; but the two sets of laws are of different sorts. One is fundamental and permanent; the other is by contrast casual and changeable.
This, then, is the second definition of a Constitution, not only that it contains the fundamental law of a State, but that it prescribes the manner in which all other laws must
