Over the course of the nineteenth century, the procedure of the House of Commons was radically transformed. The basic rules and conventions both of public legislation, which dealt chiefly with matters of general or national concern, and of private legislation, which dealt with matters of personal or local concern under a different procedure, were entirely rewritten. In this chapter, the major developments in public legislation are reviewed. The central theme is the origin of the efficient secret (i.e., a Cabinet with not only executive but also legislative predominance) in the decline of the private member. The next section describes the Cabinet's increasing authority over public legislation in the period before 1867, and the corresponding diminishment of the private member – even in the midst of the so-called golden age of the private MP. The second section attempts to explain these changes, and the third looks to their consequences.

THE CENTRALIZATION OF LEGISLATIVE INITIATIVE

In the eighteenth century, the Cabinet was almost purely an executive body. Ministers were responsible primarily for the administration of royal government, and the conception of their legislative duties extended only to the passage of measures (chiefly financial) necessary to the ordinary conduct of government. General measures of public policy, it was thought, “were properly the concern of Parliament as a whole, and should normally be introduced not by the government but by private members” (MacDonagh 1977: 5).