639
4. The Constitution of 1911 643

GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE (p. 001)

PART I.--GREAT BRITAIN

CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE CONSTITUTION

I. THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

*1. Political Pre-eminence of Great Britain.*--George III. is reported
to have pronounced the English constitution the most perfect of human
formations. One need hardly concur unreservedly in this dictum to be
impressed with the propriety of beginning a survey of the governmental
systems of modern Europe with an examination of the political
principles, rules, and practices of contemporary Britain. The history
of no other European nation, in the first place, exhibits a
development of institutions so prolonged, so continuous, and so
orderly. The governmental forms and agencies of no other state have
been studied with larger interest or imitated with clearer effect. The
public policy of no other organized body of men has been more
influential in shaping the progress, social and economic as well as
political, of the civilized world. For the American student,
furthermore, the approach to the institutions of the European
continent is likely to be rendered easier and more inviting if made by
way of a body of institutions which lies at the root of much that is
both American and continental. There are, it is true, not a few
respects in which the governmental system of the United States to-day
bears closer resemblance to that of France, Germany, Switzerland, or
even Italy than to that of Great Britain. The relation, however,
between the British and the American is one, in the main, of
historical continuity, while that between the French or German and the
American is one which arises largely from mere imitation or from
accidental resemblance.

*2. The Continuity of Institutional History.*--No government can be
studied adequately apart from the historical development which has (p. 002)
made it what it is; and this ordinarily means the tracing of origins
and of changes which stretch through a prolonged period of time. Men
have sometimes imagined that they were creating a governmental system
_de novo_, and it occasionally happens, as in France in 1791 and in
Portugal in 1911, that a regime is instituted which has little
apparent connection with the past. History demonstrates, however, in
the first place, that such a regime is apt