high stew before the trial,1 and a copy of the panel of jurors two days before the trial; that he should be entitled to process to compel the attendance of witnesses to be examined on oath, and throughout the trial to the assistance of counsel. Then to Then to power of remedy the evil arising out of the power of the high steward ard limited to constitute his court for the trial of a peer by summoning on trial of only such members of the peerage as he might see fit to select, it was enacted that all peers having the right to vote in parliament shall be summoned on the trial of any peer for treason, and that upon such trial every peer so summoned and appearing shall vote.2 peers. ments, became 5. A brief reference must here be made to certain measures Taxation of national taxation and finance originating in this reign whose and finance: influence has been permanent. An explanation has already been attempted of the manner in which the old Tudor subsidy old Tudor subsidy was superseded during the great civil war, by a system of superseded monthly assessments under which a fixed sum to be raised was by assesspartitioned between the several counties and towns wherein the taxpayers were rated by the local authorities at what they were really worth. But that method, which was employed in which also 1688, became inequitable by reason of the "exorbitant ine- inequitable; quality of the old proportions of charge, both between county and county, division and division, and parish and parish." 4 Therefore, in 1689, a new plan was adopted, which consisted of in 1689 a a rate of so many shillings in the pound in respect to incomes posed of derived from personal property, offices, and employment, and so many lands; and in 1692, a rate then imposed of 4 s. in the pound the pound; produced about £1,922,000. When that sum began to decline through imperfect assessments, parliament "abandoned the parliament principle of a rate by fixing what a rate should produce.... the "rate Henceforth the assessment of 1692 was to determine the by fixing quota of the district towards making up the sum charged in should produce;" the Act upon the particular county or town of which it formed an integral part. . . So now after the Revolution, when a 1 By 7 Anne, c. 21, the time was extended to ten days, and at the same time a list of the witnesses, and of the jury, with their professions and places of abode, was to be delivered to the accused. 8 See above, pp. 323, 324. 4 And thus the assessment became "as unpolitic and unreasonable a method of raising great sums of money as ever was introduced in any nation." -Halifax, Essay; Somers, Tracts, vol. 2 See Stephen, Hist. of the Crim. iv. p. 63. Law, vol. i. p. 165. rate im shillings in abandoned what a rate the rate after the Revolution; how appor tioned; character of rate had again been tried, it fell into the same groove as the subsidy and the fifteenth and tenth; and, though still nominally a rate of 1 s. or 2 s. or 3 s. or 4 s. in the pound, was, in effect, but a sum of about half a million, a million, a million and a half, or two millions, charged in specific amounts on particular counties and towns, and within those counties and towns portioned out between particular parishes or districts, according to the assessment of 1692."1 Such was the origin William's and character of the land tax of William's reign, which continued in force down to 1798, when Mr. Pitt, prior to the introduction of his income tax, made it perpetual at 4 s. in the form of a redeemable rent charged on the several districts. In 1694 a tax was imposed on the hackney coach business of London, which was a mere extension of the licensing system first impo- introduced in the reign of Charles I.; and in the same year stamp duties were first introduced into England, modelled after those of Holland, where it was necessary to use for legal documents paper impressed with the greater or lesser seal of the states, according to the nature of the transaction.2 land tax continued down to 1798; tax on hackney coaches; sition of stamp duties. Origin of the national debt; At the moment when the nation began to rebel against this alarming growth of taxation made necessary by the prolonged struggle with France, Charles Montague, afterwards Lord Halifax, who as a commissioner of the treasury had developed skill as a financier, proposed in December, 1692, that England should adopt the Continental plan of lightening the annual burden resulting from war by contracting a national debt. And in order to improve upon the old method of borrowing from the London goldsmiths, whose credit with capitalists had been seriously shaken through the closing of the exchequer by the Montague's Cabal, Montague resolved to utilize a plan of a national bank, a national such as already existed in Holland and in Genoa, previously suggested by a Scotchman, William Patterson. Thus it was that in the spring of 1694, when another great loan became necessary for the sustenance of the war, Montague introduced a bill for the incorporation of the Bank of England. A loan 1 Dowell, Hist. of Taxation, vol. ii. 1704; and his Life and Miscellaneous PP. 49, 50, and 51. Works in 1715, London. scheme of bank; Bank of England incorporated in 1694 2 5 & 6 Will. & Mar. c. 21; 9 & 10 Will. III. c. 25. Cf. Dowell, pp. 52, 60. 8 His "Life" is embraced in his Poetical Works, published in 1716. His Miscellaneous Works were published in The bill, which originated in the commons as a money bill, passed the lords without amendment in April. See Lords' Journals, 23d, 24th, and 25th of April, 1694. purposes, state; of £1,200,000 had already been proposed and accepted at for comeight per cent., and the subscribers were then organized under mercial the act as a chartered company, which became not only an financial ordinary commercial bank, but also the financial agent of the agent of the state in procuring loans from the people in exchange for its obligations. The complete success of the enterprise was followed by Montague's appointment as chancellor of the exchequer; and in the next year, when it became necessary in the execution of his scheme for the reform of the currency, reduced far below its nominal value by clipping, to provide for the temporary absence of coin, he issued for the first time exchequer exchequer bills. bills. cabinet William 6. A brief account of the inner circle of the privy council Progress of - first reproachfully termed in the reign of Charles I. "the governJuncto" or "Cabinet Council," and in that of Charles II. "the ment under Cabal" has been carried down to Temple's fruitless attempt and Anne: to establish such a reform as would revest in the council as a whole those vital functions silently usurped by the favored few who were for the moment specially endowed with the sovereign's confidence. The utter failure of Temple's inpracticable scheme was made complete by his consent to become, as secretary of state, a member of the inner circle of his own creation, after which event the executive power was again committed to cabinets, which, as secret committees of the king's personal advisers, directed the royal administration down to the Revolution of 1688. Thus it was that William and Mary inherited nature of the system of government by cabinets composed of ministers, as inherited each one of whom could be appointed and removed by the king by the without the consent of the rest, and each one of whom as a mere servant of the crown was directly responsible for the performance of his special duties to it alone. While such min- utter lack isters were members of parliament, they could not unite among cohesion. themselves in carrying out any joint scheme of government because there was no internal cohesion growing out of the possession of common political principles. "The truth was that 1 A royal charter was issued under the great seal to "The Governor and Company of the Bank of England," subject to the terms prescribed by parliament. The charter was granted for only eleven years certain, parliament reserving the right to end its existence by paying the debt at any time after the system former; of internal ment but no min istry; statesmen of the Revolution failed to meet the the change which the revolution had made in the house of commons had made another change necessary; and that other parliamen- change had not yet taken place. There was parliamentary tary govern- government; but there was no ministry." 1 There were only ministers "distributed not unequally between the two great parties," who as political opponents "were perpetually caballing against each other, haranguing against each other, moving votes of censure on each other; and, as a natural consequence, the temper of the house of commons was wild, ungovernable, and uncertain.' "2 How to remove this fatal evil arising out of the lack of power upon the part of the cabinet to act as a unit with the majority of the popular chamber, in which the real difficulty; sovereignty was vested, was the question of questions whose answer the statesmen of the Revolution left to those who came after them. In the course of time the mighty problem, incapable, no doubt, of an instantaneous and dogmatic solution, was finally worked out through the establishment of the two fundamental principles upon which the executive government of the British empire now reposes: first, that the select committee of the privy council known as the cabinet shall be composed only of ministers bound together by party ties for the support of a definite political programme in which they must all agree; second, that the ministers who compose this compact political unit shall hold office no longer than they can control a majority of the house of commons, The remarkable fact is, that this complete transformation in the character and functions of the cabinet, which involved a revolution in the internal mechanism of the constitution, has been brought about without any change in its outward forms, and without the enactment of any positive law whatever, As it is all-important of any posi- to clearly indicate the means by which this marvellous change was effected, the attempt will be made to unfold the subtile process actually employed in a separate paragraph. finally solved through establishment of two fundamental change brought about, without enactment tive law, understand From what has now been said, the fact appears that the through a set of tacit modern ministerial system, through whose silent growth the ings which sovereignty of the British empire has been transferred from tion made the king to the house of commons, is the fruit of the final necessary; triumph won by parliament over the monarchy in the Revolution of 1688.3 The Revolution settled the principles which the Revolu 1 Macaulay, vol. ii. p. 451. 2 Ibid., vol. ii. p. 453. 8 See above, pp. 417, 418. which the law knows nothing; which has made the great change inevitable, and then left it to time to press them to their ultimate conclusion, through a set of things of tacit understandings of which the positive law knows nothing, positive and of which there is no written memorial. No such body as the cabinet is known to English law; no such office as that of prime minister is recognized by any statute; there is no legal provision which requires the king to appoint ministers of whom the house of commons approves, or to dismiss ministers of whom it does not approve; the law knows nothing of the collective responsibility of ministers; it knows nothing of their duty to resign, or to appeal to the country, when they are rebuked by an adverse vote of the popular chamber. Of the the cabinet, existence of the privy council the law is aware, but of the inner no legal circle of the privy council, called the cabinet, it knows abso- existence, lutely nothing. The meetings of this inner circle are secret, and its proceedings, which are highly confidential, are not even recorded. From a strictly legal standpoint the cabinet is a mere phantom which passes between the parliament and the crown, impressing the irresistible will of the one upon the other. And yet, from a political and practical standpoint, the the maincabinet is the mainspring of the modern constitutional system. the modern So long, and only so long, as the royal authority is wielded in constituobedience to the will of the majority of the house of commons does the machinery of government continue in motion. The unwritten and conventional code of tacit understandings convenout of which the ministerial system has been slowly evolved, stitution as and from which it derives moral and political as distinguished distinguished from legal authority - has, within the last two centuries, grown from writup by the side of the older code of written constitutional law from which it must be sharply distinguished.1 At the end of the Revolution of 1688 the written code had reached its com- embodied pletion; at that time the Great Charter, the Petition of Right, documents; the Bill of Rights, and the Act of Settlement, when taken together, defined the prerogatives of the crown, the privileges of parliament, and the rights of the subject with about as much 1 "We now have a whole system of political morality, a whole code of precepts for the guidance of public men, which will not be found in any page of either the Statute or the Common Law, but which are in practice hardly less sacred than any principle embodied in the Great Charter or in the Petition of spring of tion; tional con ten code in certain |