can
see nothing but particular circumstances. Of lawgivers in whom the
speculative element has prevailed to the exclusion of the practical,
the world has during the last eighty years been singularly fruitful.
To their wisdom Europe and America have owed scores of abortive
constitutions, scores of constitutions which have lived just long enough
to make a miserable noise, and have then gone off in convulsions. But in
the English legislature the practical element has always predominated,
and not seldom unduly predominated, over the speculative. To think
nothing of symmetry and much of convenience; never to remove an anomaly
merely because it is an anomaly; never to innovate except when some
grievance is felt; never to innovate except so far as to get rid of the
grievance; never to lay down any proposition of wider extent than the
particular case for which it is necessary to provide; these are the
rules which have, from the age of John to the age of Victoria, generally
guided the deliberations of our two hundred and fifty Parliaments. Our
national distaste for whatever is abstract in political science amounts
undoubtedly to a fault. But it is, perhaps, a fault on the right side.
That we have been far too slow to improve our laws must be admitted.
But, though in other countries there may have occasionally been more
rapid progress, it would not be easy to name any other country in which
there has been so little retrogression.

The Toleration Act approaches very near to the idea of a great
English law. To a jurist, versed in the theory of legislation, but not
intimately acquainted with the temper of the sects and parties into
which the nation was divided at the time of the Revolution, that Act
would seem to be a mere chaos of absurdities and contradictions. It will
not bear to be tried by sound general principles. Nay, it will not bear
to be tried by any principle, sound or unsound. The sound principle
undoubtedly is, that mere theological error ought not to be punished by
the civil magistrate. This principle the Toleration Act not only does
not recognise, but positively disclaims. Not a single one of the cruel
laws enacted against nonconformists by the Tudors or the Stuarts is
repealed. Persecution continues to be the general rule. Toleration is
the exception. Nor is this all. The freedom which is given to
conscience is given in the most capricious manner. A Quaker, by making
a declaration of faith in general terms, obtains t