cular instance where
its construction is questioned. And there is (unhappily) no law that is
not sometimes altogether challenged, and set at defiance, when therefore
the law made by the people at large must be enforced on the individual,
and its defiance punished.

Unfortunately few people regard their Judicature with the same pride of
possession with which they (sometimes) regard the Legislature, and even
the Executive. Even when folk disapprove of their law-makers and their
ministers, they disapprove because they conceive they have acted
mistakenly on their behalf, whereas they conceive of judges as having
acted from a malignancy inborn in them or in the system, with the kind of
disapproval reserved for those who are created and are destined to act
against their behalf. That is--in most countries, and especially in
Ireland--a legacy from evil days, when judges were not the people's
judges, but whips sent forth through the land by some person who claimed
to be sovereign. With the reversal of sovereignty, however, the judges
become the people's judges; the courts are the people's courts, where the
laws of their own making are interpreted; the judicial system is the
people's system; and it is for the people to insist that this attitude is
observed, not only by them, but by those who interpret the laws and
administer justice. For, under the Constitution, no judge sits in any
court in the land save by an authority bestowed on him by the people, in
the Constitution which they confer on themselves. And it is for the people
to remember that fact; for only by that memory will it be recognised in
the courts themselves--and, indeed, only thus will it deserve to be
recognised there.

It is not, however, necessary that the details of the judicial system
should be worked out in the Constitution. It is not, indeed, desirable
that they should be (a consideration worthy of attention, not alone here,
but in connection with the provisions for the Executive also), for such
details belong to later legislation. All that is required in the
Constitution is the general outline of the Judiciary, and a statement of
its organic relation to the other parts of the powers of government
created under it. How that outline will be completed, and the details of
the organic relation made good, must be dealt with in a subsequent
Judiciary Act, preceded probably by a Judiciary Commission established to
review the whole of the present system and to report