ive of the operations of the public
powers.[49] The English constitution is indeed, as Mr. Bryce has
described it, "a mass of precedents carried in men's minds or recorded
in writing, dicta of lawyers or statesmen, customs, usages, (p. 044)
understandings and beliefs, a number of statutes mixed up with customs
and all covered over with a parasitic growth of legal decisions and
political habits."[50] At no time has an attempt been made to collect
and to reduce to writing this stupendous mass of scattered material,
and no such attempt is likely ever to be made. "The English," as
remarks the French critic Boutmy, "have left the different parts of
their constitution where the waves of history have deposited them;
they have not attempted to bring them together, to classify or
complete them, or to make of it a consistent or coherent whole."[51]

[Footnote 48: Introduction to the Study of the Law
of the Constitution (7th ed., London, 1908),
22-29.]

[Footnote 49: Convention occupies a large place in
most political systems, even in countries which are
governed under elaborate written constitutions.
Their importance in the government of the United
States is familiar (see Bryce, American
Commonwealth, 3d ed., I., Chaps. 34-35). On the
influence of conventions in France see H. Chardon,
L'Administration de la France; les fonctionnaires
(Paris, 1908), 79-105.]

[Footnote 50: J. Bryce, Flexible and Rigid
Constitutions, in Studies in History and
Jurisprudence (London and New York, 1901), No. 3.]

[Footnote 51: E. Boutmy, Studies in Constitutional
Law: France--England--United States, trans. by E.
M. Dicey (London, 1891), 6.]

V. THE FLEXIBILITY OF THE CONSTITUTION

*44. Aspects of Continuity and of Change.*--In pursuance of what has
been said two observations, representing opposite aspects of the same
truth, are pertinent. The first is that in respect to the principles
and many of the practices of the English constitution it is
pre-eminently true that, to employ a familiar phrase of Bishop Stubbs,
the roots of the present lie deep in the past.[52] The second is that
the English consti