, and put at once for constitution
and for law.

Either the doctrine of precedents is policy to keep a man in a state of
ignorance, or it is a practical confession that wisdom degenerates in
governments as governments increase in age, and can only hobble along by
the stilts and crutches of precedents. How is it that the same persons
who would proudly be thought wiser than their predecessors, appear at
the same time only as the ghosts of departed wisdom? How strangely is
antiquity treated! To some purposes it is spoken of as the times of
darkness and ignorance, and to answer others, it is put for the light of
the world.

If the doctrine of precedents is to be followed, the expenses of
government need not continue the same. Why pay men extravagantly, who
have but little to do? If everything that can happen is already in
precedent, legislation is at an end, and precedent, like a dictionary,
determines every case. Either, therefore, government has arrived at
its dotage, and requires to be renovated, or all the occasions for
exercising its wisdom have occurred.

We now see all over Europe, and particularly in England, the curious
phenomenon of a nation looking one way, and the government the
other--the one forward and the other backward. If governments are to go
on by precedent, while nations go on by improvement, they must at last
come to a final separation; and the sooner, and the more civilly they
determine this point, the better.*[20]

Having thus spoken of constitutions generally, as things distinct from
actual governments, let us proceed to consider the parts of which a
constitution is composed.

Opinions differ more on this subject than with respect to the whole.
That a nation ought to have a constitution, as a rule for the conduct
of its government, is a simple question in which all men, not directly
courtiers, will agree. It is only on the component parts that questions
and opinions multiply.

But this difficulty, like every other, will diminish when put into a
train of being rightly understood.

The first thing is, that a nation has a right to establish a
constitution.

Whether it exercises this right in the most judicious manner at first
is quite another case. It exercises it agreeably to the judgment it
possesses; and by continuing to do so, all errors will at last be
exploded.

When this right is established in a nation, there is no fear that it
will be employed to its own injury. A nation can have