There is no reason in theory why the current relationships
between legislature, courts and executive government should not
continue indefinitely. The tensions between the component
elements of the state have never in three centuries reached the
point of fracture; indeed, because each element depends on the
others, there is a governing incentive not to let this happen.
If such à balance were to be upset, it would almost certainly be
from outside: at its crudest, by a coup; at its most insidious,
by the absorption first of government and Parliament and then of
the judiciary by an initially legitimate but unscrupulous
political force. In constitutional terms this was the story both
of the Soviet Union and of prewar Germany: the turning-point in
each case was the collapse of freestanding political,
administrative and judicial institutions into a unitary state
machine controlled by a single party. No prescriptive document
can stem such a tide: the Nazis simply swept the Weimar
Constitution aside, while Stalin's 19