‘This order, once formed, is that which most tends to produce a good discussion’

Bentham expected the collaborative behaviour of members to evidence the ‘intelligence of the whole assembly’. What he idealised was the ‘order... once formed... that most tends to produce a good discussion’.⁶⁶ More­over, Bentham also expected the assembly’s mind to be the subject of self­examination.

Bentham moved this concept up one level of abstraction when he declared that the assembly should better itself as a law-making machine. Members should accept nothing less than application of the ‘intelligence of the whole assembly’ to the Benthamite enterprise of promoting the ‘general good’.

Adam Smith preceded Bentham in outlining the skill acquisition pathway as a portal to serious analysis of procedures at work among public officials. In an essay he composed in his Wealth of Nations titled ‘Of the Expense of Justice’ Smith declared: ‘Public services are never better performed, than when their reward comes only in consequence of their being performed, and is proportioned to the diligence employed in performing them’.⁶⁹ Smith’s ‘diligence’ was no rhetorical flourish: he focused on the skills which public

‘The tactics of political assemblies’ 135 officials acquired and the developed talent that they displayed in their offi­cial conduct. Smith’s diligence cued the reader that any member of an assembly - by extension - must learn the know-how of parliamentary procedure, for example.

Smith put ‘diligence’ - his precursor to Bentham’s ‘intelligence’ - hard at work in his Wealth of Nations. Smith employed ‘diligence’ 32 times in a work exceeding 380,000 words. In Wealth Smith also employed ‘propor­tion’ and lexically associated terms 556 times.⁷⁰ Diligence cued the reader that the author’s investigation had exposed the pathway between the vir­tual and the practical worlds. This connection was introduced in Chapter 4, this volume. Vitruvius elaborated his architectural theory, which he then reduced to the author’s ‘ability to demonstrate and explain the productions of dexterity on the principles of proportion’.⁷¹

Bentham explicitly assumed that the virtual world exists as a work-area. For example, Bentham considered whether a ‘single assembly’ was prefer­able to a bicameral system. ‘Experience proves that it is easy’ for a single chamber ‘to lay’ procedural rules ‘aside; and urgency of circumstances always furnishes a ready pretext, and a popular pretext, for doing what the dominant party desires’. Bentham continued: ‘If there are two assemblies, the forms will be observed; because if one violates them, it affords a legiti­mate reason to the other for rejection of everything presented to it after such suspicious innovation’.⁷²

Consideration of this point inspired Bentham to model venue-to-venue handoffs: ‘A second assembly may therefore be considered as a tribunal of appeal from the judgment of the first’. Bentham’s discussion here rap­idly degenerated. He offered ill-considered praise for the ‘moderation with which the House of Commons has used its power’.⁷³ Bentham did not trou­ble himself to sort out the interaction between these two Houses, wrongly (and wrong-headedly) observing that there is ‘no positive proof of good which the House of Lords has done’.⁷⁴ Had he studied Hatsell’s Lords/Supply - with scholarship equal to Jefferson’s - Bentham would have discovered that another investigator had ploughed this ground.

The Commons, however, refused them, as infringing on their privilege as to money bills, but they offered themselves to add to the bill a pro­viso to the same effect, which had no coherence with the Lords’ amend­ments, and urged, that it was an expedient warranted by precedent, and not unparliamentary in a case become impracticable, and irremediable in any other way. 3 Hats. 256, 266, 270, 271.⁷⁵

Hatsell sent Lords/Supply to press in 1785, long before Bentham began work on his Essay. Bentham ignored Hatsell’s attention to the interaction

between these two chambers. Hatsell devoted 62 of his 179 pages in Lords/ Supply to the subject. In the course of this discussion, Hatsell offered if- then-else statements that detailed the interaction between these legislative assemblies.