Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 8.djvu/266

250 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. Blackstone's language is well enough suited to the facts that can be observed in the longitude of Oxford or of Paris, and it probably did not occur to him to look much farther. Even in Blackstone's time, however, there might have been some trouble in discovering the jura summa imperii in the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, which was then living in a decrepit old age, but living still. In our own time, if we extend our view eastward to Bern, or as far west as Washington or Ottawa, we may find reason to think that Blackstone laid down the supposed necessity of an absolute uncontrolled authority in terms altogether too peremptory and universal. It would not be appropriate here to enter on the prob- lems, whether legal or political, that are raised by the institutions of federal governments like those of the United States and Switzer- land, and in a less complicated degree by those of countries where, as in the Netherlands, or an individual American State within the Union, such as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or the State of Illinois, the constitution is in fact defined by a fundamental written instrument, and the terms of that instrument cannot be altered by the process of ordinary legislation. In all such cases the ordinary legislative body is in a position much like that of the legislature in a self-governing British colony. We can hardly say that it is in no sense sovereign, for within the bounds of its com- petence it knows no human superior. But since its competence has assigned and known bonds, we cannot attribute sovereignty to it in the same sense in which sovereignty is attributed to the British Parliament. Where there is a rigid constitution, to use the convenient term introduced by Mr. Bryce and Mr. Dicey ,^ there cannot be any one body in permanent existence or habitual activity which possesses unlimited sovereignty. The nearest ap- proach to Parliamentary sovereignty as we have it in England must be sought, in every such case, wherever the ultimate power of altering the written constitution is placed by the constitution itself. In the United States, for example, this amending power is exercisable only with the consent of three fourths of the States expressed either by their legislatures or in special conventions, and moreover no State can be deprived of its equal suffrage in the 1 A. V. Dicey, The Law of the Constitution. Mr. Dicey is, I believe, the first writer who has clearly pointed out that the vital difference is not between federal and centralized governments. It is true that a federal constitution must be rigid, or it will not be truly federal. But a non-federal State may equally well have a rigid constitu- tion, though it need not; and many, probably the majority, have.