in their proper places, if the work is carried on under the eyes of a people whose taste is for homogeneous materials and a regular plan. The way to meet the difficulty is to arrange so that an ordinary spectator shall not be able to have any general view, such as would be given by codification. By this means only can you preserve the happy incoherences, the useful incongruities, the protecting contradictions which have such good reason for existing in institutions, viz. that they exist in the nature of things, and which, while they allow free play to all social forces, never allow any one of these forces room to work out of its alloted line, or to shake the foundations and walls of the whole fabric. This is the result which the English flatter themselves they have arrived at by the extraordinary dispersion of their constitutional texts, and they have always taken good care not to compromise the result in any way by attempting to form a code.
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sect. i]
The English Constitution
7
