‘A want of solid skill a kind of quackery in government'
No writer on either side of the North Atlantic was more qualified to comÂpose the concluding chapter to a history of parliamentary assemblies than Thomas Jefferson. He was well aware of his own unique qualifications, the dimensions of challenge he faced, and the laurels to be won if he succeeded.
The enterprise he shouldered obliged him to sum up the political history of the eighteenth century and point the way forward. For Jefferson, as with Hatsell and Bentham, parliamentary procedure served, among other purÂposes, as a lens through which human experience, restricted to the syncretic, was to be digested and put to use. It was undisputed that parliamentary science made forward progress in the eighteenth century than in any previÂous century. Constitution IPs ‘more perfect union' and Bentham's ‘model of perfection' framed the ambitions of political societies.1 These expressions appeared in passages composed within four years of each other, that is, in 1787 and 1791. At the time, confidence was not in short supply.Jefferson did not interpolate an equally optimistic appreciation of parÂliamentary procedure within his Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States. The Manual made sense of the core competence of legislators but did not explain to a nation's inhabitants why this competence mattered to them. If the history of parliamentary assemÂblies revolves around anything, the centre point must be taken as history in service to a nation's inhabitants. Jefferson composed an enduring work on a highly technical subject, distributing the rules of the United States Senate - which framed his comments - throughout 53 sections. Jefferson crafted the Manual as a work of specialised knowledge for legislators.
It was timely for Jefferson to extend the scope of his investigation beyond the Manual.
When William Blackstone composed the opening chapter of the fourth volume of his Commentaries (1769), he took the occasion to survey the government's reliance on command and control as a means of obtaining public compliance. Laws ‘made for the preservation of the commonwealth without great penalties are more often obeyed and kept', he observed, ‘than laws made with extreme punishments'. Blackstone had in mind the mismatch between risk and reward in criminal law as of the 1760s. He suggested, instead, that legislators fashion a ‘scale of crimes... with a correspondÂing scale of punishments’. A line or two later, Blackstone drew the reader’s attention to this suggestion by excusing himself in print. Perhaps he had in mind ‘too romantic an idea’ for the reader’s taste. Blackstone promptly turned matters upside down by arguing that criminal defendants were not the only ones who would gain if parliamentary assemblies rethought risk and reward. ‘A multitude of sanguinary laws’ does not credit ‘the wisdom of the legislative’ branch. ‘It is kind of quackery in government, and argues a want of solid skill, to apply the same universal remedy, the ultimum supÂplicium, to every case of difficulty’.2Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) declared that systems, structures and institutions in political society served as agents of civil society. ‘Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants’.3 After declaring this motto, Burke set about flogging French radicals for the sin of imagining they brought fresh ideas to the govÂernment-citizen relationship. Burke’s serious tut-tutting notwithstanding, developments were by 1790 running at full tide. One may count France’s revolutionaries as too late or too early to the party: rethinking how the fiscal-service state interacted with a nation’s inhabitants was already in full swing in the North Atlantic. Legislators’ driver of choice was debate-and- ballot; this mode of collaborative behaviour supplied energy to members and fuelled their transformation of propositions, gradatim to totaliter, in London and Philadelphia.