A survey of the executive power of the Commonwealth.

Abstract

It is an axiom that British legal and political institutions are not a manufacture but a growth. The device of the representative assembly itself, which was the incalculable contribution of England towards the solution of the world problem of government, was not the creation of any brilliant mind, but a gradual evolution from inconsiderable beginnings. Systems of government are not static but dynamic; and particularly is this true of the British system. The representative Parliament, once confirmed in its control of the public purse, made its way rapidly to omnipotence, and during more than a century while society remained in essentials unchanged, it wielded a power which was almost as unqualified in fact as it was and still is in theory. But the fundamental changes in the character- istics of communal life which, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, have continued ever since with accelerating momentum, could not fail to involve a profound re-adjustment in methods of government. The new conditions are more than a mere objective contrast with the old. The change has been psychological as well; there is ground for the belief that there has been an increasing tolerance of detailed restriction of individual liberty; though here one enters a dubious realm in which cause end effect are hard to distinguish.