parliamentary counsel though the treasury, to which latter department he was to be considered responsible. On the requisition of the treasury he was to advise on all cases arising on bills or Acts drawn by him and to report in special cases referred to him by the treasury on bills brought by private members. Thring was appointed head of the office, and was given as his assistant (Sir) Henry Jenkyns, who succeeded to the office on Thring's retirement.
Thring held the office of parliamentary counsel during Gladstone's first ministry of 1868 to 1874, during Disraeli's ministry of 1874 to 1880, and until the close of Gladstone's third brief ministry of 1886. This period was one of great legislative activity. The first important measure prepared by him as parliamentary counsel was the Irish Church Act of 1869 ; the last was Gladstone's Irish home rule bill of 1886. In the interval, among a host of other bills which did or did not find their way to the statute book, but which absorbed the time of the parliamentary counsel and his office, were the Irish Church Act of 1869, the Irish Land Act of 1871, and the Army Act of 1871, which was based on instructions given to Thring by Card well in 1867, and the labours on which, as its draftsman has remarked, lasted longer than the siege of Troy. The preparation of many bills relating to Ireland, which strictly lay outside the scope of his office, is accounted for by the circumstance that Irish bills always involve finance, and in practice the work of preparing them is apt to fall mainly on the office which works immediately under the treasury. It may be added that Thring's experience of Irish legislation made him a convinced home ruler.
Thring will be remembered as a great parliamentary draftsman. He broke away from the old conveyancing traditions, and introduced a new style, expounded and illustrated in the 'Instructions to Draftsmen,' which were used for many years by those working for and under him, and were eventually embodied in his little book on 'Practical Legislation' (1902, with an interesting autobiographical introduction). His drafting was criticised by the bench and elsewhere, often without regard for the difficulties inherent in parliamentary legislation, but the value of the improvements which he introduced into the style of drafting was emphatically recognised by the select committee on Acts of parliament which sat in 1875.
Thring was not merely a skilful draftsman. He was also 'a great legislator, so far as his duties and functions allowed, in the constructive sense. The quickness of his mind and the force of his imagination, controlled and restrained as they were by his rare technical skill, his vast knowledge of administrative law, and his instinctive insight into the nature, ways, and habits of both houses of parliament, enabled him at once to give effect to the views and wishes of the ministers who instructed him in a form best adapted to find the line of least parliamentary resistance' (The Times, 6 Feb. 1907). He thought in bills and clauses, and knew by instinct whether suggestions presented to him were capable of legislative expression, and if so how they should be expressed and arranged.
Improvement of the statute law was the object to which Thring persistently devoted the energies of his long and active life. He endeavoured to effect this object, not merely by introducing a better style of drafting new laws, but by throwing light upon the contents, diminishing the bulk, and reducing to more orderly arrangement the vast and chaotic mass of existing statute law. He was an original member of the statute law committee which was first appointed by Lord Cairns [q. v.] in 1868 ; he was for many years, and until his death, chairman of that committee and the last survivor of its original members. The work done by this committee fell under four heads: — (1) indexing; (2) expurgation; (3) republication ; (4) consolidation. The chronological table of and index to the statutes, now annually published, were prepared in accordance with a plan and in pursuance of detailed instructions carefully framed by Thring. The contents of the statute book having been thus ascertained, the next step was to purge it of dead matter. This has been done by a long succession of statute law revision bills, most of which were framed under the directions of the statute law committee at a time when Thring was its most active member. Then came the republication of the living matter under the title of the statutes revised. The first edition of these statutes substituted eighteen volumes for 118 volumes of the statutes at large, the second comprised in five volumes the pre-Victorian statutes which had formerly occupied seventy-seven volumes. In the process of consolidation, although a great deal still remains to be done, much was done in Thring's time and under his guidance, and his name takes the first place in the history of this important task.
