‘Representatives had neither honour, honesty nor ability to discharge their duty’

The urge to go on record as approving and rejecting treaty terms (faithfully incorporated into the Treaty of Paris, 3 September 1783) met no hurdle in the existing practices or in any Standing Order.

North had sought leave to bring in a bill to enable members of the House - as a body - to audit the auditors it appointed. North detailed the objects which the bill addressed. It was designed to ‘inform the House and the

‘The eternal rules of justice and reason’ 61 public, the real state of the accounts of the kingdom, that the nation might be informed how and in what manner the enormous sums which had been granted by parliament have been disposed of’.³⁷ North proposed, however, that no member of the House should serve as a commissioner. To a cynic, North hoisted Burke on his own petard; Burke’s answer to every conceivable flaw in British governance - as far as North was concerned - was to abolish dual office-holding. North argued against members serving as commission­ers in the public audit: First, ‘because it would take up their whole time, and of course draw their attention from the business going on in parliament; sec­ondly, that be the commissioners who they may, no matter from which side of the House selected, it would be deemed a party appointment’.³⁸

Burke’s riposte - drawn from the Parliamentary History - ran as follows: ‘to exclude members of the house’, he argued, was ‘a scandalous reflection upon them, and disparaging them in the eyes of their constituents, who would by this open stigma be told what kind of persons they were looking up to for a redress of grievances; for though the grievances chiefly com­plained of were abuses in the expenditure of public money, the principle of the proposed Bill amounted to an acknowledgment, that their representa­tives in parliament had neither honour, honesty nor ability to discharge the most essential part of their duty’.³⁹ The bill passed its third reading on 22 June 1780, by the thoroughly sullen margin of 34 to 15. The Act of Par­liament duly appeared in the statute books as 20 Geo.

the said Commissioners shall, from time to time, at their Discretion, or as often as they shall be thereunto required... without any further Requisition, give an Account of their Proceedings in Writing... to both Houses of Parliament.

When Pitt found it convenient to amend this statute in 1785, he neutered the auditors’ obligation to report to the House of Commons. This truncation appeared in 25 Geo. 3 c. 52, Section XIV:

when examinations of each account shall be compleated by the said commissioners, they... shall... lay the same before... the commis­sioners of the treasury.

Pitt had gambled - correctly as it turned out - that members would rarely stir themselves to make a call for the public accounts. What had taken place, functionally considered, was equivalent to a determined attempt by mem­bers to distort process by refusing to write procedures which would have enabled them to do their jobs. Pitt took full advantage of the opportunity presented to him.

If there is no connection between process and merit, why does a signifi­cant step forward in process occur at the moment when a primitive system

teeters on maturation into its provisional stage? Is this just a coincidence? Edmund Burke offered his own thesis on this point; Burke explained why the core competence of legislators made a difference to the legislature’s delivery of benefits. I give Burke the podium in the last half of this chapter, but not without interruption. I will break Burke’s link between process and merit - framed within the ‘stable and eternal rules of justice and reason’⁴¹ - by inserting two sections. These bring in the core competence at work in the House of Commons and in the Continental Congress.