But upon the Continent it is of the
highest importance; as, where the government is an outgrowth of a
relation of supremacy and subordination between sovereign and subject,
and the servant, trained in ideas natural to this relation, does not
know which to obey, the law of the sovereign, the existence of such a
law would deprive him of the excuse which, should he offend the law, and
so be guilty of a crime, is ready to his hand in the phrase, 'The
sovereign ordered it so, I have merely obeyed,' while it would be a
protection to the sovereign that his servants, if guilty of a crime,
should not be able to saddle him with the blame of it."--_Life of the
Prince Consort_, v., 262.]
[Footnote 7: "Lives of the Lord Chancellors," c. cxliii.]
[Footnote 8: Indeed, the opinion which Lord Campbell thus expresses is
manifestly at variance with that which he had previously pronounced in
his life of Lord Northington, where he praised the House of Lords for
"very properly rejecting the bill passed by the Commons declaring
general warrants to be illegal, leaving this question to be decided (as
it was, satisfactorily) by the Courts of Common Law."]
[Footnote 9: From a speech of Mr. Grenville delivered at a later period
(February 3, 1769, "Parliamentary History," xvi., 548), it appears that
the Secretaries of State who signed this general warrant did so against
their own judgment.
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