‘The laws are so well calculated to secure personal liberty’

Hatsell’s mastery of these tools - looking backwards to that which is describ­able and forwards to prescription - did not guide him to an acceptable

‘This John Milton deserves hanging’ 45 resolution of the greatest challenge he faced in employing his well-known ‘rule to go by’.

But in these, and every other instance of this sort, it is more material that there should be a rule to go by, than what that rule is; that there may be an uniformity of proceeding in the business of the House, not subject to the momentary caprice of the Speaker, or to the captious dis­putes of any of the Members.⁵⁵

Hatsell’s rule to go by might be rephrased as follows: if a rule is untethered both from the assembly’s history and from best practices, then the assem­bly learns little, if anything, from the collaborative act of formulating such rules. Exploring the conditions of possible experience and flipping a coin between any two competing choices would seem a rational way to select one of two procedural options. Hatsell’s eager leap to the aspirational figured in his argument that British legal structures were ‘well calculated to secure and defend the life, the property, and the personal liberty of every individual’.⁵⁶ He framed this passage in the Preface to Members/Speaker:

That as this is the only Constitution which, from the earliest history of mankind, has had for its direct object “Political Freedom”; so there is none other in which the laws are so well calculated to secure and defend the life, the property, and the personal liberty of every individual.⁵⁷

This quotation enjoyed a distinguished pedigree. Baron Charles-Louis Mon­tesquieu praised the British constitutional arrangements: ‘One nation... has for the direct end of its constitution, political liberty’.⁵⁸ This well-turned phrase became, in the hands of William Blackstone, an ornament to grace his Commentaries.

So that this review of our situation may fully justify the observation of a learned French author, who indeed generally both thought and wrote in the spirit of genuine freedom; and who hath not scrupled to profess, even in the very bosom of his native country, that the English is the only nation in the world, where political or civil liberty is the direct end of its constitution.⁵⁹

Hatsell attempted to make his way down from the aspirational to the techni­cal in the following remarks: ‘The only weapons by which the minority can defend themselves from those in power’, he observed in Members/Speaker,

are the forms and rules of proceeding; which have been adopted, as they were found necessary, from time to time, and are become the Standing Orders of the House; by a strict adherence to which, the weaker party can only be protected from those irregularities and abuses, which these

forms were intended to check, and which the wantonness of power is but too often apt to suggest to large and successful majorities.⁶⁰

In the preceding exposition, Hatsell ventured from Montesquieu’s vantage - outside of political society - to the rough and tumble he viewed every day from his seat at Clerk’s Table. Hatsell was, however, unable to make a con­vincing connection between ‘liberty’ in political society and members’ tech­nical skill in procedural matters. Why was it that members’ adherence to procedures enhanced Blackstone’s ‘political or civil liberty’? If the major­ity sought to change a procedural rule - clearing obstacles to Parliament’s enactment of its programs - why would it matter if some logic could be discovered in such a modified procedure? Hatsell recognised this dilemma in his concession: ‘it is always in the power of the majority, by “their num­bers,” to stop any improper measures proposed on the part of their oppo­nents’.⁶¹ Given the foregoing, why would a majority care about the details of any procedural rule that an expert in parliamentary procedure might fashion? In other words, why did the assembly’s facility with Aristotelian de omni matter at all?