Page:Lectures on The Historians of Bohemia by Count Lutzow (1905).djvu/120

and grant him unlimited power in certain cases. The first difference, however, appears in this, that the matters in which the power of the sovereign was unlimited were not always the same as they are in modern constitutions but sometimes quite different. Thus, for instance, the Bohemian king had a considerable income that was not voted or controlled by the Estates, while the modern constitutional system renders all matters of finance dependent on the consent of the people. On the other hand, the modern constitutional system usually imposes no restrictions as regards the armed forces of the country. The sovereign is lord of war and peace, and can engage the country in war even against its will. The king, according to the Bohemian constitution, had not this full power. But the principal difference between the constitution based on the Estates and modern constitutions is comprised in the answer to the question. Who shared with the sovereign the sovereign rights, or rather, who controlled the royal power? This factor which, beside the sovereign, directly participates in the exercise of sovereign rights, consists in modern times of the representatives of the people generally, chosen either by the whole adult male population or by a comparatively large proportion of the more wealthy and more educated citizens, partly also of those who are selected among the large landowners and higher officials of the country. In the old Bohemian constitution this factor consisted exclusively of privileged classes of people who were known as the “Estates.” Among these representatives that element prevailed which is still dominant in the English House of Lords, the higher nobility which owned vast estates in the land.’