Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/531

 drew the series of bills which culminated in the Companies Act of 1862. His treatise on this Act went through three editions. Thring's work on these measures began when he was still in private practice at the bar, but in 1860 he was appointed to the important office of home office counsel. This office had been created in 1837, when, as a consequence of the Reform Act of 1832, the responsibility of the government for current legislation had been largely increased, and had devolved mainly on the home secretary. John Elliot Drinkwater Bethune [q. v.] was the first holder of the post, and, on his appointment in 1845 to the governor-general's council at Calcutta, his successor, Walter Coulson [q. v.], was entrusted with the wider duties of preparing under the direction of the home secretary bills originating from any department of the government, and of revising and reporting on any other bills referred to him by the home office. These were the duties taken over by Thring, and in his performance of them he appears to have drawn all the most important cabinet measures of the time. In his introduction to 'Practical Legislation' (1902) he described how he drew for Lord Derby's government the famous 'ten minutes' bill, the bill which, after radical alterations in parliament, became law as the Representation of the People Act, 1867. The story illustrates the conditions in which the work of drafting parliamentary bills is sometimes performed. On 3 March 1866 (November in Thring's account is an obvious slip) Spencer Walpole [q. v.], the home secretary, sent for Thring and asked him to read a bill which had been prepared by (Sir) Philip Rose, a parliamentary agent who acted for Disraeli in election matters. Thring expressed to Walpole, and on the following day to Lord Derby, an unfavourable opinion on the draft. He was asked to put himself in communication with the draftsman, and was engaged in doing so when he received from Disraeli, through his private secretary Montague Corry (afterwards Lord Rowton), a message saying that the bill was to be entirely redrafted on different lines, and must be ready on Saturday the 16th. On Friday 15 March Thring took the bill in hand, and, working with two shorthand writers from ten to six, completed it. It was printed during the night, laid before the cabinet on Saturday, considered by Disraeli on Monday, and circulated to the House of Commons on Tuesday. This tour de force in draftsmanship could not, as Thring explains, have been accomplished if he had not been saturated with his subject. He had drawn for the government the franchise bill of 1866, which did not become law, and had prepared in connection with it a series of memoranda and notes which bore fruit in the following year.

At the end of 1868 Disraeli was succeeded as prime minister by Gladstone, with Lowe as chancellor of the exchequer. One of Lowe's first steps was to improve the machinery for the preparation of government bills. The most important of them were, at that time, prepared by the home office counsel, but some departments continued to employ independent counsel to draw their bills, and other bills were drawn by departmental officers without legal aid. The result of this system, or absence of system, was unsatisfactory. The cost was great, for counsel charged fees on the parliamentary scale. There was no security for uniformity of language, style, or arrangement in laws which were intended to find their places in a common statute book. There was no security for uniformity of principle in measures for which the government was collectively responsible. And, lastly, there was no check on the financial consequences of legislation, nothing to prevent a minister from introducing a bill which would impose a heavy charge on the exchequer and upset the budget calculations for the year. The remedy which Lowe devised was the establishment of an office which should be responsible for the preparation of all government bills, and which should be subordinate to the treasury, and thus brought into immediate relation, not only with the chancellor of the exchequer, but with the first lord of the treasury, who was usually prime minister. The office was constituted by a treasury minute dated 8 Feb. 1869. The head of the office was to be styled parliamentary counsel to the treasury, and was given a permanent assistant, and a treasury allowance for office expenses and for such outside legal assistance as he might require. The whole of the time of the parliamentary counsel and his assistant was to be given to the public, and they were not to engage in private practice. The parliamentary counsel was to settle all such departmental bills and draw all such other government bills (except Scotch and Irish bills) as he might be required by the treasury to settle and draw. The instructions for the preparation of every bill were to be in writing or sent by the head of the department concerned to the