The first of these three organic parts, obviously, is the Legislature, since laws cannot be executed or interpreted until they first exist. The second, equally obviously, is the Executive, since laws, having come into existence, must first be put into execution before they can be liable to interpretation, or before they can be said to require enforcement. But when a Legislature and an Executive have been brought into existence, as necessary organisations for a people's government of themselves, a Judicial organisation at once becomes necessary. For no law can so be made as of itself to fit each particular case. Laws, by their nature, are of general meaning, and must be interpreted to the particular instance where its construction is questioned. And there is (unhappily) no law that is not sometimes altogether challenged, and set at defiance, when therefore the law made by the people at large must be enforced on the individual, and its defiance punished.
Unfortunately few people regard their Judicature with the same pride of possession with which they (sometimes) regard the Legislature, and even the Executive. Even when folk disapprove of their law-makers and their ministers, they disapprove because they conceive they have acted mistakenly on their behalf, whereas they conceive of judges as having acted from a malignancy inborn in them or in the system, with the kind of disapproval reserved for those who are created and are destined to act against their behalf. That is--in most countries, and especially in Ireland--a legacy from evil days, when judges were not the people's judges, but whips sent forth through the land by some person who claimed to be sovereign. With the reversal of sovereignty, however, the judges become the people's judges; the courts are the people's courts, where the laws of their own making are interpreted; the judicial system is the people's system; and it is for the people to insist that this attitude is observed, not only by them, but by those who interpret the laws and administer justice. For, under the Constitution, no judge sits in any court in the land save by an authority bestowed on him by the people, in the Constitution which they confer on themselves. And it is for the people to remember that fact; for only by that memory will it be recognised in the courts themselves--and, indeed, only thus will it deserve to be recognised there.