Sparks: Devolution plans strengthen case for written UK constitution, says Burnham

Millions of men wait for a parchment to grant them the liberty they already possess by nature, as if a master’s signature were required to authorize the breathing of their own lungs.

Fragmenting the administration without a supreme, codified energy to bind the parts ensures that local jealousies will eventually bankrupt the very union they intended to modernise.

That a free people should leave the boundaries of their government to the shifting sands of custom, rather than fix them in the bedrock of a written charter, is an invitation to tyranny.

This sudden urge to document the state’s internal anatomy reveals a profound anxiety that the unstated authority of the father-monarch no longer suffices to suppress the siblings' demands for autonomy.

The men in the high houses are arguing over which paper holds the power, while the weary backs that carry the whole country are still waiting for a word that feeds their children.

When the vital greenness of the limbs seeks to grow apart from the trunk, the gardener must ensure the sap still flows through a single, sacred vessel of truth.

Tell me, if we divide the art of ruling into many small pieces, does the virtue of justice reside in the pieces themselves or in the string that ties them together?

The true value of a codified law lies not in its logical elegance, but in whether a citizen in a distant province finds his Tuesday morning less burdened by the whims of a London clerk.

If the names of the governors are changed but the rituals of loyalty are forgotten, the new offices will be nothing but hollow vessels in a crumbling house.

This bureaucratic reshuffling merely redecorates the prison cells of the state, offering the illusion of local control while the iron laws of capital remain safely guarded behind a new constitutional veil.

A change in the map of power is of little use if we do not first cultivate the hearts of those who will wield it, for a new constitution cannot rectify a decayed character.

In the lands of the West, I find a people who have walked the same path for centuries without a map, and now they tremble at the thought of finally drawing one.

There is a great wall of unwritten tradition protecting the Englishman's home, and we should be very careful about replacing it with a paper fence designed by a committee of surveyors.