lost to sight in the verdure. Before venturing upon this river you must be sure to take in the whole of its course from a distance, you must study the chain of mountains in which it rises, the affluents which swell its waters, the valleys in which it widens out, the sharp turns where it gets choked with sand, and the alluvial soil which it deposits on its banks. The most fertile of these preparatory studies, and that which should come first, is the analysis of the sources of the Constitution.
Section i
In the year 1793 Hérault de Séchelles inquired at the Bibliothèque Nationale for a copy of the laws of Minos. Any one would make the same mistake now who hunted for the text of the English Constitution. There is no text but there are texts. These texts are of every age and have never been codified. Nor even taken all together do they contain nearly the whole of English constitutional law, the greater part of which is unwritten. On any question of importance it is necessary to refer, in almost every case, to several different laws whose dates are centuries apart, or to a series of precedents which go far back into history. For example,
