of their legal powers and procedure is founded principally upon the patents of great offices of State, Acts of Parliament, judicial decisions, and reports of Parliamentary committees and commissions of inquiry.
In order to confine this Work within the limits of a compendium, it has been deemed advisable to exclude all researches of purely antiquarian interest, and all merely speculative politics. It would not, indeed, have been expedient to have excluded all historical and theoretical researches, for there are many important provisions of the Constitution which would be unintelligible without reference to them. But throughout this Work such researches have been carefully limited to the purpose of illustrating the use and operation of established principles and institutions of Government. Scire autem propriè est rem ratione
et per causam cognoscere.
For the sake of brevity, it has been generally deemed expedient to omit statements of authorities in the text, and to confine them to the notes. This arrangement seemed the only means of combining the advantages of an elementary treatise with those of a guide to the fuller study of the Constitution, and will account for the number of notes throughout the book. It may be added that the references, amounting to several thousands in number, have been collected diligently during many years in the intervals of the toils of a laborious profession, and have all been taken directly from the authorities cited.