[366:1] This last, however, does not contain the text, but only a list of titles, of local and private acts, although many of them are legally public general acts. On the other hand the published statutory orders for the year do not include by any means all the orders of a temporary nature.
CHAPTER XX
PRIVATE BILL LEGISLATION
If the direction of important legislation of a public character lies almost altogether in the hands of the ministers, special laws affecting private or local interests are not less completely outside of their province.
The Nature of Private Bills.
Private Acts of Parliament are of immemorial antiquity, but they seem to have first become numerous in connection with the building of turnpike roads and the enclosure of commons in the second half of the eighteenth century.[367:1] They were also the means used to authorise the construction of canals, and later of railways; and, in fact, it was the great number of railway bills, presented in 1844 and 1845 that gave rise to the modern private bill procedure in the House of Commons.
Apart from railway bills they have been used of late years chiefly to regulate local police and sanitary matters, or to grant powers to private companies or municipal corporations for the supply of public conveniences, such as water, gas, electric light, or tramways; for private bill procedure applies not only to bills that affect private persons or companies, but also to those that deal with the rights and duties of organs of local government in any particular place.[367:2]
The line, however, between public and private bills is not altogether logical. Measures, for example, touching matters of general interest affecting the whole metropolis have been passed as public bills; and this has been true to a smaller extent of other places; while bills regulating affairs of less importance for those very areas have been treated as private. In fact the same subject has at different times been dealt with by public and private bills; the question which procedure should be followed depending upon the uncertain standard of the degree in which the public interest was involved.[368:1] With these exceptions it may be said that every bill introduced for the benefit of any person, company or locality, is, for the purposes of procedure, a private bill.
