acile
popularisers of this sort may have mollified the drawing-room; but they
did not add to political ideas.

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 t