INITIATIVES.

Our evidence rarely permits a complete understanding of how bills came to be proposed and promoted, but often suffices to tell important things about the initiative behind legislation. When we know the text of a bill we can rely on the probability that a full enacting clause means private promotion while a short clause implies government origin. However, most bills, and especially those that failed, are but titles to us. Older views which tended to solve the problem by assuming that in the sixteenth century public acts of Parliament originated with the government have long ceased to convince. We no longer suppose with A. F. Pollard that before Elizabeth's reign bills for the common good were always devised by the Council, or with Wallace Notestein that only in the reign of James I ‘the House of Commons’ wrested the legislative initiative from the Crown. Even so, the various ways in which bills came to be put forward and pursued are still not sufficiently appreciated. Yet if, for instance, policy is to be evaluated by means of acts of Parliament it obviously becomes very necessary to gain a clear understanding of the minds and the people behind them: a judgment touching what was done depends on at least some knowledge of who did what. It also seems to have been generally assumed that every Parliament's output stood by itself; insofar as bills have been studied this has been done within the compass of individual sessions. This, however, will not serve. Acts often resulted from efforts renewed in Parliament after Parliament; failed bills quite frequently reappeared in later sessions, sometimes making it to the statute book after several endeavours. Nor have we yet fully grasped how widely spread the interest in promoting legislation could be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]