Conclusion
When Hatsell considered new rules - whether as innovations or improvisations - he declared that such procedures need only meet a minimal standard: that is, rules for the sake of rules.
That is, any given ‘rule to go by’ might be taken as rationally or irrationally grounded. The toggle itself was arbitrary. Hatsell regarded indeterminacy in evaluating a practice or procedure as a positive virtue. I underline this level of abstraction. Hatsell’s first thesis declared that any given rule-generating algorithm (or template to generate instances of algorithms or well-formed formulas) might be set to spin off rules that lack any tether to history. Moreover, confusion in data as sampled liberated rule-writing.There might be redeeming virtues inherent in a procedural code based on Hatsell’s rules to go by. Minority voices could count on a chance for their hearing when debate-and-ballot resolved merit issues in the chamber. This result would occur because the random generation of procedural rules would be immune to coup de main. For instance, an assembly’s majority or an assembly bully can’t game or skew generations of procedural rules with featureless content.
On further consideration, however, all male inhabitants of the island of Mytilene might have been put to the sword if a coin flip denied the assembly at Athens its opportunity to reconsider the debate and decision of the day before.62 Cleon would be out of luck if the drachma flipped in favour of such reconsideration. And - to Hatsell’s point - Thucydides would have no reason to craft the magnificent speech he put into Cleon’s mouth, a speech that connected the aspirational to the technical. Yes, the aspirational choice was for evil - civic bullying was Cleon’s vision of hell for his city - but it was an
‘This John Milton deserves hanging’ 47 ideal, all the same.
In Athens, in London, and soon enough in Washington, grounding the aspirational to the technical will be revealed as the supreme intellectual challenge for the political scientists of the eighteenth century.Notes
1 Williams, Clerical Organization, 107.
2 Ibid, 114.
3 Hatsell, Members/Speaker, 185.
4 Williams, Clerical Organization, 83.
5 Dedicatees Dyson, Cornwall and Montagu were allied with factions which modern readers would recognise as Whiggish in their preferences; this rough assignment makes Addington more of a Tory. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, Dyson acquired the nickname of ‘Mungo’: ‘His quickness and shrewdness were constantly in requisition, and he interposed so often in the business of the house, that Colonel Barre on 26 Jan. 1769 provoked general laughter by remarking, “The honourable gentleman, Mr. Dyson, has the devil of a time of it, ‘Mungo here, Mungo there, Mungo everywhere’ The nickname stuck to him for the rest of his life’. Dictionary of National Biography (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1888; ed. Leslie Stephen), 36:300.
6 Williams, Historical Development, iii.
7 Williams, Clerical Organization, xiii, 90.
8 Hatsell, Privileges, v.
9 Bentham, [Preface to Essay], 1.
10 See text at 10-13.
11 Commons Journal, 24:263. Hardinge referenced Richard Hakewit ‘The Manner how Statutes are enacted in Parliament, by Passing of Bills’ (1659). ‘The Loss of antient Journals is imputed by Mr. Hakewit in his preface before-mentioned to the “Want of a proper Provision for safe preserving of them answerable to what the Lords have, whose Clerk has a House belonging to him and his Successors where all their Records are kept to Posterity”.’ Further discussion on the spelling appears at 35 n. 35.
12 Commons Journal, 24:262; 31 May 1742. Hardinge’s report to the Committee appears in three Appendices at 263-266.
13 Ibid., 24: 263, 31 May 1742.
14 Ibid., 24:262; 31 May 1742.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 24: 262-263; 31 May 1742.
17 Hatsell, Privileges, v. The editors of Commons Journals volumes 33 and 34 supplied requisite finding aids for the reader’s use. The volumes covered sessions beginning with the opening of Parliament on 13 November 1770 and 26 November 1772, respectively. These volumes had just appeared when Hatsell sent his Collection of Cases to press.
18 Hatsell, Members/Speaker, 47-48.
19 Ibid., 13 n. 2.
20 Ibid., 48.
21 Quoted in Williams, Clerical Organization, 83-84.
22 Hatsell, Members/Speaker, 185.
23 Ibid., 47.
24 Williams, Clerical Organization, 90-95 offers a thumbnail of John Ley’s career at Clerk’s Table, which ‘began a connexion between the Ley family and the House which lasted till within living memory’, 90.
25 Williams, Clerical Organization, 90.
26 Hatsell, Members/Speaker, 203 n. 1.
27 Williams, Clerical Organization, 87.
28 Hatsell, Members/Speaker, viii.
29 Word count by author.
30 Hatsell, Members/Speaker, 2.
31 !bz'd., 273.
32 Hatsell, Members/Speaker, 52-55.
33 Word counts by author.
34 Hatsell, Members/Speaker, viii.
35 Hatsell, Privileges, 132.
36 Word count by author.
37 See text at 85-86.
38 See text at 151-55.
39 Howell, Logic and Rhetoric; Howell, British Logic.
40 Ibzd., 695-696.
41 Hatsell, Members/Speaker, 85.
42 Ibid., 86.
43 Ibid, 5-6.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., 86 n. 1.
46 Ibid., 258.
47 Ibid, 258 n. 1.
48 Ibid., 259 n. 1; Hatsell’s footnote begins on 258.
49 Ibid., 256.
50 Ibid., 259 n. 1 [emphasis in original]; Hatsell’s footnote begins on 258.
51 Ibid., 172.
52 Russell, Parliaments, 141.
53 10 Geo. 3 c. 16, Section I.
54 Cobbett’s, Parliamentary History, 18:50; ‘Debate in the Commons on the Mode of Proceeding with Election Petitions’, 6 December 1774.
55 Hatsell, Members/Speaker, 149-150.
56 Ibid., xi.
57 Ibid.
58 Montesquieu, Spirit, Book XI.5.
59 Blackstone, Commentaries, 140-141.
60 Hatsell, Members/Speaker, 172.
61 Ibid.
62 See text at 10-13.