There were many writers upon the British Constitution
before Walter Bagehot, but they were mostly lawyers
and detached observers of structure, whereas he, with
his daily contacts with Ministers and Government
Departments, saw motive and method from within. He
was sensitive to the differences between theory and
practice, and the regularity with which outmoded
practice became newly accepted theory. He gave the
subject at once the actuality of the finest journalism and
yet brought it for the first time under the scientific
discipline of analysis and established causation. He
fitted it too to be an item in an academic curriculum.
Fortunately for us, he did not wait, like Courtney, to
reach his seventies before garnering the fruit of a long
experience of government from within, but his forty
years of age were ripe with accumulated impressions.
Books on this subject then came out at long intervals
and each in turn was absorbed as the authority for its
decade. To-day they pour from the press, mostly by
professional and professorial observers of government
from more or less detached angles, most of them ex-
cellent in their own field, and each contriving, owing to
the greater width and richness of the subject-matter, to
present novel aspects and original comment. Bagehot
spoke of the main difficulty of his task as involved in the
fact that the object "is in constant change, a 'living'
thing", which must be seized for a static picture at some
point of time. Courtney, also, said the unique charac-
teristic of our constitution is that it is subject to constant
and continuous growth and change. "It is a living
organism, absorbing new facts and transforming itself."
But modern writers do not dwell much on this difficulty

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