Subject to this saving remark, however, I not only admit, but maintain, that our constitution is full of curious oddities, which are impeding and mischievous, and ought to be struck out. Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete. Just so the lines of our constitution were framed in old eras of sparse population, few wants, and simple habits; and we adhere in seeming to their shape, though civilisation has come with its dangers, complications, and enjoyments. These anomalies, in a hundred instances, mark the old boundaries of a constitutional struggle. The casual line was traced according to the strength of deceased combatants; succeeding generations fought elsewhere; and the hesitating line of a half-drawn battle was left to stand for a perpetual limit.

I do not count as an anomaly the existence of our double government, with all its infinite accidents, though half the superficial peculiarities that are often complained of arise out of it. The co-existence of a Queen’s seeming prerogative and a Downing Street’s real government is just suited to such a country as this, in such an age as ours.’¹

The effect of this history, and the consequent institutions, upon what our national character is, has been great; and its effect on the common idea of that character cannot be exaggerated. Half the world believes that the Englishman is born illogical, and that he has a sort of love of complexity in and for itself. They argue no nation with any logic in them could ever make such a constitution. And in fact no one did make it. It is a composite result of various efforts, very few of which had any reference to the look of the whole, and of which the infinite majority only had a very bounded reference to a proximate end. The French political work is just the same in like circumstances. Under the old régime, each province in France had most complex and traditional institutions, which have perished out of memory, very much because they were so involved that no one can describe them at once truly and graphically. They were so very bad that they have ceased to be remembered against the national character. Even under the present Government, whenever a large body of political relations is the gradual effect of changing arrangements, complexity comes out. Any one who will try to state at all accurately the relations between the French railways and the Emperor will find that he has taken in hand a very difficult descriptive task, so complex is the present bargain, and so inexplicable, except by reference to previous bargains.

The evidence of language, the best single evidence of national character, goes to show that the English care more, even than the French, for simplicity, and are less patient of meaningless anomalies. If the facts were the other way, I am sure we should have many a pretty essay in Paris on the barbarous conservatism of the English in retaining genders. As they have kept and we abandoned them, we hear nothing about it; but a more meaningless anomaly, or one less explicable except by dim investigation into the far-off antiquity of language cannot be found. The plain English grammar is evidence all through of the fundamental simplicity of the English character. I believe it is admitted that the Americans are a logical people, and French and Germans, too,—so that the ingredients of the English people and the outcome of it are both logical, but that the nation itself is illogical. There is an obvious improbability in this theory which should keep people from asserting it.

But though I deny that the English Constitution is a result of an illogical intellect, and though I maintain that at bottom the English character is mentally and morally very consistent and straight-forward, yet I concede that the spectacle of this beneficial puzzle (for such our constitution is to most who live under it), is not a good teaching for symmetrical arrangements. Being in itself, as Englishmen think, so good and yet so illogical, it gives them a suspicion of logic. Seeing that the best practical things they know are produced by an inexplicable process, they are apt to doubt the efficiency of any explicable process. And as far as the constitution itself is concerned they are right in thinking it dangerous to apply to it quick and sweeping thoughts. You must take the trouble to understand the plan of an old house before you can make a scheme for mending it; simple diagrams are very well on an empty site, but not upstairs in a gothic mansion. Any good alteration of our constitution must be based on a precise description of the part affected, and that delineative premiss can scarcely ever be plain. So far the English suspicion