[BOURINOT | A STUDY IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS 25 
strongest possible feeling—as, for instance, the right of the Chinese to 
settle in the country—are determined by the judicial bench, and the 
decision of the bench is acquiesced in by the people. This acquiescence 
or submission is due to the Americans inheriting the legal notions of the 
common law; that is, of the most legal system of law, if the expression 
may be allowed, in the world.” 
These remarks apply with full force to the Canadian people, who 
look to the courts for the only satisfactory solution of many difficulties 
in the working of their constitution, This judicial interpretation of 
written constitutions is not new in the experience of British countries, 
but is coincident with the creation of colonies or provinces in America. 
The privy council of England was always the supreme court of appeal 
for the dependencies of the crown, to whom could be referred those 
questions of law that arose in the old colonies as to the construction to 
be put on their charters of government. An American writer! has very 
clearly explained, in the following paragraph, the principles on which 
the courts have always interpreted written instruments or charters of 
government : 
“In deciding constitutional questions, the supreme court [of the 
United States. and Canada as well] interprets the law in accordance 
with principles that have long governed the courts of England. For 
when an English judge finds conflict between an act of parliament and a 
judicial decision, he sets aside the decision, as of an authority inferior to 
that of the act ; and if two parliamentary acts conflict, the earlier is set 
aside as superseded by the later one,—the court interpreting the law 
simply by determining what is law as distinguished from what is not. 
The range of this English usage was somewhat amplified in the colonies, 
owing to the fact that, instead of parliament, the colonial courts had 
legislatures to deal with, which acted, in most instances, under written 
charters limiting their powers, as also under the general domination of the 
home government. The colonial judiciary did not hesitate to adjudge a 
local statute invalid if its enactment could be shown to have exceeded 
powers conferred by charter ; and the privy council, in the capacity of a 
supreme court for the colonies, decided in like manner conflicts between 
laws. When state constitutions succeeded to the charters, the process was 
continued by the state courts in cases showing conflicts between statutes 
and the new constitutions judicially interpreted. The national govern- 
ment, with a constitution of its own, created an element of superior law, 
in conflict with which not only state but national enactments of lesser 
authority are nullified. All that the judiciary does in England, and all 
that it does in the states, and in the courts of the United States [and we 
may add Canada], is to uphold the authority of what it decides to be 

! Dr. Stevens’s ‘‘ Sources of the Constitution of the United States,” pp. 191, 192. 
