SEPARATION OF POWERS AND JUDICIARY 611 



science, and to whom you will allow me to render the tribute of my 

 homage. I learned from him that the American rule proceeded 

 from the English origin of your judicial institutions, from that wide 

 range of competence of the English courts which permitted them to 

 pass decisions on all public and private matters, and also from the 

 colonial judicial regime which prevailed before the proclamation of 

 your independence. 



The French rule, on the contrary, was derived from the same source 

 that restricted the jurisdiction of the courts in regard to the acts of 

 the administration. 



The men of the Revolution had been the spectators of the struggle 

 between the parliaments and the King towards the end of the 

 monarchy. They had noticed that, in the last years of the eighteenth 

 century, the parliaments had attempted to prevent the King from 

 carrying out reforms demanded by public opinion and indeed had 

 sometimes succeeded in doing so. Such reforms could not be 

 executed through enactments of the council, which for a long time 

 past had been free from the interference of the judical bodies; 

 the King was compelled to carry them into practice through edicts, 

 ordinances, and declarations for which the sanction of the sovereign 

 courts was indispensable. Indeed, the aim pursued by the men 

 of the Revolution was to prevent the judicial bodies which succeeded 

 the parliaments from resuming the warfare against the political 

 powers, the legislative as well as the executive. 



Thus, it appears, Montesquieu's theory was not applied, but the 

 rules in process of elaboration in our old public law were taken up, 

 sanctioned definitely, and formulated in terms of greater precision; 

 doubtless they were not laid down with as much precision as the 

 rules applying to the executive, but we shall find them sufficiently 

 precise, especially if we look upon the matter from the point of view 

 of the spirit of the institution itself. 



Nor should it be overlooked that the Revolution achieved both 

 socially and politically the most wonderful reforms ever recorded 

 in history, and that in the midst of unheard-of difficulties it intro- 

 duced new principles forcibly, although they clashed with numerous 

 and considerable interests. How could these men who wished to 

 transform society, and who succeeded in so doing, put up with a rule 

 so apt to prove a hindrance to their progress? 



The objection might be made that the special circumstances under 

 which the political powers were striving in the advent of new ideas 

 are now over. Why, then, shrink from adopting the American sys- 

 tem, the only one which can logically be derived from the theory of 

 written constitutions? 



All attempts made in that direction have so far failed, as I have 

 already stated. They have failed everywhere, in France and in all 



