A Vindication of the British Constitution
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1954.tb01212.x |
| Date | 01 December 1954 |
| Author | K. C. Wheare |
| Published date | 01 December 1954 |
A
Vindication
of
the British
Constitution
By
PROFESSOR
K.
C.
WHEARE
This appraisal
by
the Gladstone Professor of Government and
Public
Administration
in
the University
of
Oxford
of
Mr. Herbert Morrison’s
recent book “Government and Parliament,”
was
broadcast in the
Third Programme
on
28th October,
1954.
HE
British Constitution is, roughly speaking, what the people who work
T
it
think it is. Yet how rarely those who are in a position to know, tell
us
what they think. The best book on the British Constitution in the
nineteenth century was written not by a statesman, but by a journalist and
banker, Walter Bagehot. And if you wanted to study the subject further
you could look at the works of a novelist, Anthony Trollope, who, it is true,
was
also
a civil servant, but a civil servant only in
his
spare time. And yet
it is not that our statesmen were not writing men. They did write books.
Mr. Gladstone wrote on Homer and on Church and State
;
Disraeli wrote
novels
;
Lord Rosebery wrote biographies
;
Mr.
Balfour discoursed on
“
Philosophic Doubt
”
;l
and in
our
own day we are accustomed to having
a Prime Minister who, whether in the guise of biography or of autobiography,
writes first-rate books on history.
But
even Mr. Churchill, with all
his
range and power as a writer, has not written a book on the Constitution.
It was only indeed in recent years, with the publication in 1947 of Mr.
L.
S.
Amery’s
Thoughts on the Constitution,
that a statesman of the first rank had
thought it worth while to comment on the system of government which he
had known from the inside. And now this year in
Mr.
Herbert Morrison’s
Government and Parliament
we have the first full-dress survey of the working
of
the Constitution from the inside
by
one who has been for many years
at
the centre
of
events.
In
all that
I
have said
so
far
I
do
not forget that Disraeli wrote a book
on the Constitution. His
Vindication
of
the English Constitution
was a powerful
tract, but it was published in
1835,
two years before he was elected to the
House of Commons, and very many years before he could claim to know
anything about the subject. Mr. Morrison’s book resembles Disraeli’s in
one or two respects.
It
too is a work of the imagination, but whereas in
Disraeli’s book the imagination of the fiction-writer was applied to English
constitutional history, in Mr. Morrison’s book the imagination
of
the political
artist brings to life what in the hands of most writers is dead and dull-the
theory and working
of
our political institutions. Above all, Mr. Morrison’s
book is, like Disraeli’s, a vindication of the English constitution, but it
is
a
vindication based not only upon tradition and faith, but also and mainly
upon
experience.
A
Front Benched Constitution
,Mr. Morrison’s book
is
a front bencher’s book. And this is not surprising
for,
in the twenty years and more that Mr. Morrison has had as a member
of
the House of Commons, only about a year was spent, in the parliament
‘His
introduction to the
World’s
Classics edition
of
Bagehot’s
English Constitution
;I928)
is
an indication
of
the brilliant speculative
book
he
might have written
on
the
constitution had he chosen
to
do
so.
403
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