Section vii
Nations compelled to break with their past necessarily fall back on rationalism, and try to invest its principles with the authority which they can no longer find in the prestige of history. It requires a considerable effort on the part of the French to acknowledge that this incongruous compilation which I have been describing is a constitution. I must compare the formation of the English Constitution to a slowly formed and uncertain deposit at the bottom of a dull and cloudy liquid, as unlike as possible to the rapidly formed precipitates and brilliant crystallizations to which I liken the French constitutions. Nevertheless, this strange English Constitution has its value—which value has been tested by ages—and it has also its own peculiar genius.
It has three special characteristics.
First, there once had been revolutionary elements in this as in other constitutions, but here the revolutionary spirit has been turned out of its course and absorbed into the current of tradition. A fiction of old hereditary liberties is substituted for a fiction of abstract rights, elaborated by reason and conquered by force.
Secondly, the Constitution is not codified, hardly even written, and thus it escapes, so to say, all translation into common language: its language is reticent and veiled, the whole thing differs little from ordinary laws, so that amendments brought on by time easily find
