three branches, but will be withstood by one of the other two; each branch being armed with a negative power, sufficient to repel any innovation which it shall think inexpedient or dangerous.”  It is in the king in Parliament that British sovereignty resides.  Eschewing the notion of an original contract, Blackstone yet thinks that all the implications of it are secured.  “The constitutional government of this island,” he says, “is so admirably tempered and compounded, that nothing can endanger or hurt it, but destroying the equilibrium of power between one branch of the legislature and the rest.”

All this is not enough; though, as Bentham was to show in his Fragment on Government, it is already far too much.  “A body of nobility,” such is the philosophic interpretation of the House of Lords, “is also more peculiarly necessary in our mixed and compounded constitution, in order to support the rights of both the Crown and people, by forming a barrier to withstand the encroachments of both ... if they were confounded with the mass of the people, and like them had only a vote in electing representatives, their privileges would soon be borne down and overwhelmed by the popular torrent, which would effectually level all distinctions.”  “The Commons,” he says further, “consist of all such men of property in the kingdom as have not seats in the House of Lords.”  The legal irresponsibility of the King is emphasized.  “He is not only incapable of doing wrong,” says Blackstone, “but even of thinking wrong; he can never mean to do an improper thing; in him is no folly or weakness,” though he points out that the constitution “has allowed a latitude of supposing the contrary.”  The powers of the King are described in terms more suitable to the iron despotism of William the Norman than to the backstairs corruption of George III.  The right of revolution is noted, with justice, as belonging to the sphere of morals rather than of law.

“Its true defect,” says Professor Dicey of the Commentaries, “is the hopeless confusion both of language and of thought introduced into the whole subject of constitutional law by Blackstone’s habit—­common to all the lawyers of his time—­of applying old and inapplicable terms to new institutions.”  This is severe enough; yet Blackstone’s sins are deeper than the criticism would suggest.  He introduced into English political philosophy that systematic attention to forms instead of substance upon which the whole vicious theory of checks and balances was erected.  He made no distinction between the unlimited sovereignty of law and the very obviously limited sovereignty of reality.  He must have known that to talk of the independence of the branches of the legislature was simple nonsense at a time when King and peers competed for the control of elections to the House of Commons.  His idealization of a peerage whose typical spiritual member was Archbishop Cornwallis and whose temporal embodiment was the Duke