n. The doctrine of implied powers, which has saved the
country and the Constitution too, has been made possible only by
reading our Constitution by the light of our institutions, as Hamilton
and Marshall did.

And so our security is not in the written word of the Constitution
alone; it is there, of course, but it is in our institutions also
which are the spirit of the Constitution, which illumine and emphasize
the meaning of that noble instrument. England has no written
constitution; certain other countries have had and have now ideal
written constitutions.

And yet England has steady and continuous liberty and law, while those
others, even with written constitutions, frequently have had
bureaucracy and military absolutism. They had the _forms_ of liberty
and popular government in these written constitutions, but they did
not have free institutions, which alone make formal constitutions
living and vital things.

England, without a written constitution, is almost as free a
government as ours. Law reigns supreme. The poorest gatherer of rags
has equal rights before the bar of justice with belted earl or
millionaire, and those equal rights are impartially enforced. Neither
wealth nor title are favored more than poverty or humble rank in the
courts of England; and even royalty appears as witness, the same as
his meanest subject.

The Government itself is subject to the will of the people; and no
ministry remains in power in face of an adverse majority, or forces
into law an act of which the people disapprove. The English Parliament
goes to the people as often as the Government, in any of its proposed
measures, fails of a majority. The suffrage is constantly enlarging,
and the rights of labor are almost as carefully guarded by the laws
of England as by ours.

England's treatment of Ireland has been harsh, severe, unjust; and yet
even there the spirit of a larger liberty in the interest of the Irish
tenant, approaching state socialism, compels the landlord to sell his
land whether he wants to or not, at a price fixed by others than
himself, and enables the tenant to buy the land by the payment of his
rent. Tolerance, justice, and individual liberty are daily developing
throughout the British Empire, instead of diminishing.

And yet England has no written constitution. But she has institutions,
free institutions, institutions similar to those we have here in
America. It is the free institutions of England that preserve