108 Chapter VI
simultaneously bowed to them; they triumphed in America and in the East.
Empire was on them bestowed; where Caesar’s eagles never flew, as Cowper put
it, none were as invincible as they. Surely the constitution of such a people must
harbor the true secret by which freedom, wealth, power, and leadership might all
be enjoyed at the same time.
Blackstone’s Commentaries were published between 1765 and 1769. In the ten
years from 1767 to 1777 appeared the Rotuli parliamentorum, the first substantial
printed collection of medieval parliamentary acts. It was sponsored by the House
of Lords, which was motivated both by a desire to set forth the historical evidence
for its own important position in English life, and to open up, if not quite to cre-
ate, the whole field of English constitutional history as a learned science. Mean-
while, the writings of Montesquieu were having their cumulative effect. Every two
or three years a new edition of the Spirit of Laws appeared in English. Readers in
England, as in the American colonies, could there find the assurance, on the au-
thority of the great French expert on comparative government, that they lived
under a constitution wholly devoted, through its ingenious separation of powers,
to the preservation of liberty. Or at least they could find it if they looked for it hard
enough, for Montesquieu actually gave only about a seventy- fifth part of his com-
pendious treatise to the specific subject of the British constitution.^3
The first book by a Continental European ever devoted wholly to that subject,
and under that title, appeared at Amsterdam in French, as La Constitution de
l ’Angleterre, in 1771.^4 There was a London edition in 1775, and over twenty differ-
ent London and Dublin imprints of the Constitution of England can be counted for
the ensuing half- century. The book figured as a British political Bible until after
the First Reform Bill. It did more than Montesquieu to spread an understanding
of the British constitution on the Continent. It is worthy of note, and is of course
a consequence of the American Revolution, that a single New York edition seems
to have satisfied the American demand.
The author of the Constitution of England was the Genevese Delolme, one of the
advanced democratic party at Geneva in 1767. He had upheld there the Sover-
eignty of the People against the theory of Orders within the state. So firmly did he
cling to this principle that he refused to accept the compromise made at Geneva in
January 1768, and a few months later went into voluntary exile. He arrived in En-
gland a stubborn democrat. Within three years he had produced his book on En-
gland, which became the classic statement of the theory of a balance among King,
Lords, and Commons. It thus seems that he changed his mind, and the few who
have tried to look closely at Delolme, of whose career few evidences have survived,
have seen in him a significant change in a “conservative” direction, from ideas re-
sembling those of Rousseau to ideas resembling those of Montesquieu. It is very
likely that he did change his mind, because he is known to have been mixing with
some of the discontented Whigs in England at the time when Lord North took
3 On Blackstone and Montesquieu see Chapter III above; for the significance of the Rotuli parlia-
mentorum see E. Lousse, La société d ’ancien régime: organisation et représentation corporatives (Louvain,
1943), I, 2.
4 G. Bonno, La constitution britannique devant l ’opinion française de Montesquieu à Bonaparte (Paris,
1932), 118–25; E. Ruff, Jean Louis Delolme und sein Werk über die Verfassung Englands (Berlin, 1934).