III

A more fertile source of inquiry was to be found among the students of constitutional law.  Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-9) has had ever since its first publication an authority such as Coke only before possessed.  “He it is,” said Bentham, “who, first of all institutional writers, has taught jurisprudence to speak the language of the Scholar and the Gentleman.”  Certainly, as Professor Dicey has remarked, “the book contains much real learning about our system of government.”  We are less concerned here with Blackstone as an antiquarian lawyer than as a student of political philosophy.  Here his purpose seems obvious enough.  The English constitution raised him from humble means through a Professorship at Oxford to a judgeship in the Court of Common Pleas.  He had been a member of Parliament and refused the office of Solicitor-General.  He had thus no reason to be dissatisfied with the conditions of his time; and the first book of the Commentaries is nothing so much as an attempt to explain why English constitutional law is a miracle of wisdom.

Constitutional law, as such, indeed, found no place in Blackstone’s book.  It creeps in under the rights of persons, where he deals with the power of king and Parliament.  His treatment implies a whole philosophy.  Laws are of three kinds—­of nature, of God, and of the civil state.  Civil law, with which alone he is concerned, is “a rule of civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong.”  It is, he tells us, “called a rule to distinguish it from a compact or agreement.”  It derives from the sovereign power, of which the chief character is the making of laws.  Society is based upon the “wants and fears” of men; and it is coeval with their origin.  The idea of a state of nature “is too wild to be seriously admitted,” besides being contrary to historical knowledge.  Society implies government, and whatever its origins or its forms there “must be in all of them a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority, in which the jura summa imperii, or rights of sovereignty reside.”  The forms of government are classified in the usual way; and the British constitution is noted as a happy mixture of them all.  “The legislature of the Kingdom,” Blackstone writes, “is entrusted to three powers entirely independent of each other; first the King, secondly the lords spiritual and temporal, which is an aristocratical assembly of persons, chosen for their piety, their birth, their wisdom, their valour or their property; and, thirdly, the House of Commons, freely chosen by the people from among themselves, which makes it a kind of democracy; and as this aggregate body, actuated by different springs and attentive to different interests, composes the British Parliament and has the supreme disposal of everything; there can be no inconvenience attempted by either of the