Europe and America have owed scores of abortive constitutions,
scores of constitutions which have lived just long enough to make
a miserable noise, and have then gone off in convulsions. But in
the English legislature the practical element has always
predominated, and not seldom unduly predominated, over the
speculative. To think nothing of symmetry and much of
convenience; never to remove an anomaly merely because it is an
anomaly; never to innovate except when some grievance is felt;
never to innovate except so far as to get rid of the grievance;
never to lay down any proposition of wider extent than the
particular case for which it is necessary to provide; these are
the rules which have, from the age of John to the age of
Victoria, generally guided the deliberations of our two hundred
and fifty Parliaments. Our national distaste for whatever is
abstract in political science amounts undoubtedly to a fault. But
it is, perhaps, a fault on the right side. That we have been far
too slow to improve our laws must be admitted. But, though in
other countries there may have occasionally been more rapid
progress, it would not be easy to name any other country in which
there has been so little retrogression.

The Toleration Act approaches very near to the idea of a great
English law. To a jurist, versed in the theory of legislation,
but not intimately acquainted with the temper of the sects and
parties into which the nation was divided at the time of the
Revolution, that Act would seem to be a mere chaos of absurdities
and contradictions. It will not bear to be tried by sound general
principles. Nay, it will not bear to be tried by any principle,
sound or unsound. The sound principle undoubtedly is, that mere
theological error ought not to be punished by the civil