Note 71:1 — Chapter X · (continued 2)

The forms of voting and coming to a decision in the British Parliament have been adopted by other countries, not from any partiality towards our systems, but because in this we seem to have approached abstract perfection; and the framers of codes, after all endeavours to make forms of like excellence, are obliged to have recourse to those which have been followed for centuries in St. Stephen's. In the French Assemblies, ingenuity was frequently exercised in vain to devise some plan by which, after a series of proposals had been made, and debated upon, the sense of the meeting in regard to them might be ascertained and recorded without the record being liable to be questioned as inaccurate. In the English system, the matter is at once solved. Each proposed resolution is made and put on record before the discussion begins, and however many different proposals there may be in relation to the subject of debate, they must be all put in writing, and each one must be singly, and without intermixture with the others, adopted or rejected by a vote of the house.