Chapter VIII: Capacity of Constitutions for Territorial Expansion

One point more remains to be mentioned before we quit constitutions of the Flexible type, viz. their suitability to a State which is expanding its territory and taking in other communities whether by conquest or by treaty.

Such constitutions seem especially well suited to countries which are passing through periods of change, whether internal or external. When new classes of the population have to be admitted to share in political power, or when the inhabitants of newly-acquired territories have to be taken in as citizens, this is most quickly and easily effected by the action of the ordinary legislature. Both Rome and England availed themselves of this flexibility in the earlier stages of their growth. England, itself created as a State by the expansion of the West Saxons, enlarged herself to include Wales with no disturbance of her former Constitution, and similarly fused herself with Scotland in 1707 and with Ireland in 1800, in both cases altering the Constitution of the enlarged State no further than by the admission of additional members to the two Houses of Parliament, and by the suppression of certain offices in the smaller kingdoms. The ease with which the earlier expansions were effected may be attributed to the fact that in mediaeval times the prominence of the king made the submission of any tribe or territory to him carry with it the incorporation of that tribe or territory into his former dominions. The popular assembly of a community, such as were the South Saxons, for instance, sank into a secondary place as soon as the king was head of the South Saxons as well as of the West Saxons, for the council of the united people which he summoned and over which he presided became the national assembly for all his subjects. In later times, though Scotland and Ireland had their separate Parliaments, these could be readily united with that of England, because in all three countries the popular House was representative. Here, however, England has stopped. The vast dominions which she possesses beyond the oceans, while legally subject to her Crown and Parliament, have not been brought into the constitutional scheme of the motherland. Indeed they could hardly be brought in without a reconstruction of the present frame of government, which would probably have to be effected by the establishment of a Rigid Constitution.

Similarly the Roman State had its first beginnings in the union of neighbouring tribes, whose popular assemblies coalesced into one assembly. As time went on, the flexibility of the constitution permitted the extension of political rights to a number of communities which had lain outside the old Roman territory. But the process presently stopped (so far as effective political expansion was concerned), because the representative system had not yet been invented. When after the great revolt of the Allies in B.C. 90 Rome was compelled to grant full citizenship to a large number of Italian communities, she did not take what moderns might think the obvious course of creating a representative assembly to which these allied communities might send elected delegates, but merely distributed the new citizens among her old tribes, an expedient which so far improved the position of the Allies that they became legally equal to Roman citizens, and acquired thereby various privileges and exemptions, but which extended to them practically no share in the government, since few could not come to Rome to give their votes in the assembly of the people. It may well have been that neither the oligarchs nor the leaders of the so-called popular party at Rome were willing to resign a substantial part of the power of the inhabitants of the City, with the opportunities of bribing and being bribed, in exchange for the primacy of a Federal or quasi-Federal Italian republic. But that the notion of a representative assembly had not crossed men’s minds appears from the circumstance that the Italian Allies themselves, when in the course of their struggle they set up a rival government, merely reproduced the general lines of the Roman constitution, and did not create any representative council, excellently as it might have served their purpose. So strong was the influence of the idea of the city community in the ancient world, and (it may be added) so little power of invention do mankind display in the sphere of political institutions.

When an expanding State absorbs by way of treaty other communities already enjoying a government more or less constitutional, the process now usually takes the form of creating a Federation, and a Federation almost necessarily implies a Rigid Constitution. Cases where the Flexible Constitution of one State is stretched to take in another (as the Constitution of England was stretched to take in Scotland) are rare. The ancient Romano-Germanic Empire had a Flexible Constitution, which, already in an advanced stage of decay, was extinguished by Napoleon. When it was desired to re-establish a German Empire out of a number of practically independent States, this had to be done by the creation of a federal system under a Rigid Constitution. No similar device was required in the case of Italy, because the communities which united themselves to the kingdom of Sardinia between 1859 and 1871 had not theretofore enjoyed constitutional government, had just dismissed their whilome sovereigns, were all eager for union, and in their eagerness for union cared but little for the maintenance of any local rights.