‘Persons had their estates cut through by a canal’
Reflection enabled legislators to assess how the real world had been impacted by both their procedural and merit choices. The following case study will illustrate that, as of 1774-75, the House of Commons understood how to go about exploiting such an introspective moment.
In 1774 Commons required personal notification of pending projects to landowners. Before that time, the appearance of a survey party entering one’s property might be the first notice that a new canal project was under construction.46 This was another example of beggaring behaviour. One canal company might take care to notify all landowners of its preferred route and, most probably, take the opportunity to begin negotiations on rightÂof-way acquisition. Another company might cut corners, with the result that owners might have ‘their Estates cut through by a Canal... almost without any Notice at all’. In the same tranche of newly-composed Standing Orders (1774), the House of Commons ordered the chair (of the committee to which the improvement bill had been committed) to report to the House ‘evidence’ of the promoters’ compliance with Commons’ Standing Orders.
In 1775 Commons revisited these requirements by delegating review to a committee, instructed to ‘take into consideration the Standing Orders of this House, relating to private Bills... and to report the same, with their Opinion thereon’.47 Frederick Montagu - to be honoured as the dedicatee of Hatsell’s Lords/Supply (1785) - supplemented the committee’s report to the House with the following remarks.
Many Members of your Committee cannot but remember the great Inconveniencies which were felt, and much complained of, before the making of these Orders; Persons residing at a Distance had their Estates cut through by a Canal, or were put to great Expences for an IncloÂsure, almost without any Notice at all, or at least too late to have an Opportunity of considering the Proposition maturely, and of laying their Observations upon such Bills before Parliament with Effect; and for these Reasons, your Committee have been of Opinion, that the said Orders are highly necessary, and ought to be strictly observed.48
The Montagu committee properly assumed that a canal company’s failure to give notice of its pending construction plans constituted a form of priÂvate cheating.
If permitted or condoned, this cheating degraded Commons’capacity to manage its legislative processes. The beginning of the law-making process afforded the most opportune moment for legislators to conform their behaviour to best procedural practices. Waiting until after landowners had ‘their Estates cut through by a Canal’ obliged Commons to deal with remedial action - if at all feasible - after the damage had been done. In Dauntonian terms, the stakeholders’ complaint would be expressed as folÂlows: the House of Commons lacked sufficient insight into its role in politiÂcal society to consider the possible distortion of relevant notice regimes. This would be, on his reasoning, a trust violation assignable to members.
Private cheating behaviour increases costs of transacting legislative busiÂness. If government assumes the inter-connectedness of human behaviour, then modest incentives can bring large-scale rewards. But that also sugÂgests that modest disincentives can rapidly destabilise a system which is built on, for the most part, voluntary compliance. Members of the House of Commons might fret - as they did in November 1775 - about the precise route by which canal builders report their compliance to that body. But this assumes that all consumer behaviour is available for survey. Some consumÂers will make their wishes, hopes and fears known to the assembly through such information-gathering while others may, uninvited, make their views known directly to the members of the assembly. In other words, successÂful management of the fiscal-service state is layered on expectations that both government and consumers make about an exchange of information between them. Stakeholders retailing their views to the legislature and legisÂlators reaching out to locate and measure stakeholder expectations operate within the same model. That is, they both assume that the information they have exchanged arose from and was shaped by events common to both the class of legislators and a given class of stakeholders.
The information itself was changing as views were exchanged between these classes of public and private actors. As the ancient philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus might have said, you never exchange the same information twice.Legislators can’t do two things at the same time: they can’t reliably hear witnesses - that is, encounter the real world in its changing contours - and also formulate or improve rules governing this encounter. When inundated by stakeholder expectations, legislators found - we are back in NovemÂber 1775 - that the future present encroached on their present discourse. No one ever spoke to a law-maker without wanting something from the conversation. But what about the past, available as it is in two flavours, the immediate and the remote? The former is always available through the recollection of senior members of the assembly. It requires no sociology to point out that in any gathering those with experience to retail are not shy about letting their grey hairs do the talking. Segregate legislators’ encounÂters with stakeholder input from the introspective and reflective enterprise and legislators were, at last, on their own.
The groundwork here was laid by John Hatsell in his Members/Speaker (1781, rev. ed. 1785). The past did not dictate procedure to the present.
‘The average price of peace and war’ 109 The past did not even supply a reliable source of data, when legislators engaged in the rule-writing enterprise. Hatsell catalogued instances of the null case, which I have counted in Chapter 1, this volume. In addition, the past might deliver incomplete or inconsistent data; it might offer patterns of past practice that were too general or too detailed to be of service. Members, naturally enough, might garble their memories of past institutional events. Hatsell addressed these difficulties in his first thesis: a ‘rule to go by’ delinked the need to give reasons for rules from the enterprise of writing procedures. A double insulation was therefore at work in the study interval. When legislators reviewed and revised their own procedures they were, for the most part, insulated, on the one hand, from the commonplace demands of stakeholders (for immediate delivery of benefits and relief from burdens) and likewise insulated from the demands of any historical enterprise which insisted that the way forward was dictated by yesterday’s pathways. Free from the future present and the immediate or remote past, legislators were free to indulge a contemplative moment. This moment was grounded in consideration of their present circumstances. It was the very act of doing nothing that shed light on the fact that everything an assembly did - including reflecting on its role in political society - reshaped the world through which the assembly made its planetary-like way.