Experimental and Conservative Tendencies in French Constitutions.
The two tendencies, experimental and conservative, have both been manifested many times in French constitutions. How many there have been of them I cannot inform the reader. Dicey gives a minimum of sixteen; there may have been more. The number of them is of no importance; the state of mind that produced them is alone of any real importance.
The Love of Change not the Motive for making written Constitutions.
The Desire for Order and Permanence.
Premature Hopes of Order.
Revision.
It has commonly been assumed that a state of mind which could produce so many constitutions was animated by the love of change. This is exactly the opposite of the truth. Those who love change on its own account provide for it by the most elastic arrangements in order to leave everything open. The state of feeling that induces men to bind themselves, or try to bind themselves, by written rules for their future guidance is a desire for order and permanence. All that can be truly said against the French experimenters is that their hopes of orderly arrangements were premature. Even when producing disorder they have been lovers of order and desired it, though during many years, in the eagerness of inexperience, they failed to perceive that their political life was still too much unsettled to be cast into fixed forms. At last, without abandoning the safeguard of a written constitution (that of 1875 has already a respectable antiquity), they have provided for future changes by making revision possible under conditions that have hitherto completely assured the maintenance of order.
Sir Henry Maine on the Dislike to Change.
The Mohammedan World.
Africa.