Effect of

new procedure;

ment.

Journals with the reign of Edward VI, we find the three readings to be the practice of the lower House also.

Different as was the practice of a medieval Parliament to that of the Parliaments of our own time, we can trace even in the conduct of legislation during the fourteenth century the rudiments of modern procedure. The king opened Parliament with a statement of his wants and a promise to redress grievances; petitions were based upon grievances and presented before the grant of supply: the petitions and the subsequent grants passed from Commons to Lords, and received the royal assent in words still in use. When the intended statute was drawn up in a bill, and no longer left in the inchoate form of petition, it offered fuller opportunities for discussion and probably rendered necessary a closer attention to procedure and the rules of debate.

But the form of legislation by bill presented for the acceptance or rejection of the Crown did much more than help to formulate Parliamentary procedure, or to secure the due effect of the royal assent to a petition. It estabished the distincin increas- tion between Executive and Legislature, the Crown in Council ing power of Parlia and the Crown in Parliament; and though in seeming it was merely a change from the suggestion of a topic of legislation to the suggestion of a topic clothed in the form of legislation, it really laid the foundation of the omnipotence of Parliament. Until this mode of legislation came into practice, the Houses had petitioned the crown for the redress of public grievances, just as the suitor petitioned the Crown in Chancery for the redress of a private and individual grievance. The legislative act came from the Crown, and though Lords and Commons might complain of legislation, which was not initiated or embodied in their petitions, yet such legislation did take place from time to time, and all laws were left to the Crown to make, and depended for form and time of making upon the pleasure of the Crown.

But when the Houses of Parliament took into their own hands the drafting of Statutes, their demands for legislation

became definite and urgent; the laws which they desired to see made could not be varied, postponed or nullified. They no longer asked the Crown to assent to the making of a law on a given subject, and then to make one, but they asked it to say 'yes' or 'no' to the passing of a law drawn in the form in which they wished it to pass, and no longer admitting of amendment.

When the Crown could no longer control legislation, except by refusing assent to laws framed and presented for its acceptance or rejection, there had plainly arisen a new legislative power outside the executive. The Houses and the Crown had changed places: the assent of the former had hitherto been required to measures generally initiated by them, but always framed by the Crown: henceforth assent or rejection was all that was left to the Crown in dealing with measures initiated, framed and passed by the House.

A full account of the antiquities of Parliamentary procedure might fill a volume with interesting matter, but the brief sketch which I have just given may suffice as an introduction to what is important for my present purpose, the mode in which laws are framed and passed at the present time.

SECTION II.

ORDINARY PROCEDURE OF THE HOUSES. PUBLIC BILLS.

§ 1. Business of each day.

In order to follow the process of legislation it is necessary to consider, however, briefly and in outline the forms of business of the Houses, because it is somewhat difficult to trace the steps by which a bill becomes law, if those steps traverse a region with which the reader is wholly unfamiliar. Perhaps the simplest way of getting at the procedure of the House of Commons will be to take a statement of the ordinary business of the day, to consider what the various items of business

Private business.

Public

mean, and to select for further inquiry so much as is relevant to my present purpose.

The order of business is as follows.

The House generally proceeds each day with: 1. Private Business; 2. Public Petitions; 3. Giving Notices of Motions; 4. Unopposed Motions for Returns; 5. Motions for leave of Absence; 6. Questions; 7. Orders of the Day and Notices of Motions as set down in the Order Book.

I will examine these in order.

1. Private business means private bill legislation, and I propose to defer the treatment of this until I have concluded the more important topic of public bill legislation.

2. Public Petitions are petitions from localities or bodies petitions. of persons or individuals, relating to matters of public policy and general concern which are under the consideration of Parliament, or which it is desired to bring under the consideration of Parliament. They must be distinguished from the private petitions which form the first stage in private bill legislation. These public petitions are a feature in the Post, ch. x. aspect of Parliament as the Grand Inquest of the nation, § 4. and I shall have more to say of them in the concluding chapter of this book.

Notices of motion.

3. Giving notices of motion. 'Every member,' says Sir E. May, 'is entitled to propose a question, which is called moving the House, or, more commonly, making a motion: but in order to give the House due notice of his intention and to secure an opportunity of being heard, it has long been customary to give the House due notice of his intention, and to have it entered in the Order book or Notice paper.' Such notice of his intention must be put into writing and delivered by the member, with his name and the day on which he proposes to bring on such motion, to a clerk at the table.

The precedence of these questions is established as follows. A member who desires to propose a question to the House must, in the first instance, place his name on the notice paper. Each name on the notice paper is numbered, and

when the time for this part of the business of the House arrives, the numbers are all put into a ballot box, shuffled, and drawn out one by one by a clerk at the table. As each number is drawn, the name of the member to whom it belongs is called by the Speaker. The member thereupon gives notice of his motion and gets priority of choice of day and hour according to the order in which his number comes out of the ballot box.

Motions

for returns,

4. Motions for Returns are motions for accounts or papers to be supplied to the House. If no opposition is raised to such motions they are allowed to come on in the place assigned to them in the list of business in the Standing Orders. 5. Motions for Leave of Absence. A member is supposed to for leave of be always in attendance upon the House; if, therefore, he desires to be absent for any time, he must apply for the leave of the House, and this may be granted or refused 1.

absence.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when members did not live with the fear of the constituencies before their eyes, absence without leave was regarded as a serious impediment to business. Nowadays the evil remedies itself: a constituency will not return a member who neglects his duties; but when the constituencies did not know or did not care how far their members attended to the business of the House, it was necessary to deal with the matter otherwise. Thus an Act of Henry VIII exonerates a shire or borough 6 Hen. VIII, c. 16. from payment of wages to members who left Parliament before the end of the Session without a license from the Speaker, which license was to be entered of record in the book of the clerk of the Parliament appointed for the Commons House.' And the House seems to have been inclined to treat as vacant the seat of a member who, from his engagements elsewhere, was unable to take part in the business of the House.

Thus on the 18th of February, 1625, 'Mr. Gay informeth the

182 Com. Jour. 376.

Enforcement of attend

ance.

A call of the House.

Questions.

House that he is returned a burgess for the City of Bath, and is mayor of the same city; and besides, one of the principal men of their city hath murthered himself, and his wife; and that the mayor is the only coroner, and therefore desireth leave to go home. "Referred to the Committee of Privileges whether a new writ shall issue.

'Resolved, upon the causes alleged by Mr. Gay, he shall have liberty to depart home to the City of Bath, about those affairs"."

The House, as has been already noticed, in dealing with the disqualification of unsoundness of mind, has shown itself reluctant to declare a seat vacant on the ground of incapacity to attend Parliament. But a member who contumaciously refuses to fulfil the duties of membership may be placed in the custody of the Serjeant-at-arms, and though the only recent case of this nature relates to attendance at a Committee, there seems no reason why non-attendance after leave of absence refused should not be treated as a contempt.

Enforcement of attendance for some special purpose by means of an order for a call of the House may be said to have fallen into disuse. There has been no such call since 1836. In the event of a call of the House a member who neither attended nor offered a sufficient excuse would be brought in the custody of the Serjeant-at-arms to receive such sentence as the House might think it right to inflict 3.

6. Questions. These are inquiries addressed to Ministers of the Crown, or to members concerned in the business of the House, on matters connected with the business of Parliament or with the administration of government. Such inquiries ought not to be of an argumentative character, but should be so framed as merely to elicit the information wanted. Nor should the answer do more than convey such information, though a Minister of the Crown may sometimes go further

1 I Com. Jour. 821.

2 Case of Mr. Smith O'Brien, lxxxv Hansard, 1291. And see case of Mr. J. P. Hennessey, clvi Hansard, pp. 1931, 2213.

s The last occasion of a call of the House was on the 19th April, 1836. The last occasion of a motion for a call was on the 23rd March, 1882.