or Heliogabalus, to raise great armies, to carry on expensive wars.  Something of this sort had actually happened under Charles the Second, though his reign, reckoned from the Restoration, lasted only twenty-five years.  His first Parliament settled on him taxes estimated to produce twelve hundred thousand pounds a year.  This they thought sufficient, as they allowed nothing for a standing army in time of peace.  At the time of Charles’s death, the annual produce of these taxes considerably exceeded a million and a half; and the King who, during the years which immediately followed his accession, was perpetually in distress, and perpetually asking his Parliaments for money, was at last able to keep a body of regular troops without any assistance from the House of Commons.  If his reign had been as long as that of George the Third, he would probably, before the close of it, have been in the annual receipt of several millions over and above what the ordinary expenses of civil government required; and of those millions he would have been as absolutely master as the King now is of the sum allotted for his privy-purse.  He might have spent them in luxury, in corruption, in paying troops to overawe his people, or in carrying into effect wild schemes of foreign conquest.  The authors of the Revolution applied a remedy to this great abuse.  They settled on the King, not the fluctuating produce of certain fixed taxes, but a fixed sum sufficient for the support of his own royal state.  They established it as a rule that all the expenses of the army, the navy, and the ordnance should be brought annually under the review of the House of Commons, and that every sum voted should be applied to the service specified in the vote.  The direct effect of this change was important.  The indirect effect has been more important still.  From that time the House of Commons has been really the paramount power in the State.  It has, in truth, appointed and removed ministers, declared war, and concluded peace.  No combination of the King and the Lords has ever been able to effect anything against the Lower House, backed by its constituents.  Three or four times, indeed, the sovereign has been able to break the force of an opposition by dissolving the Parliament.  But if that experiment should fail, if the people should be of the same mind with their representatives, he would clearly have no course left but to yield, to abdicate, or to fight.

The next great blessing which we owe to the Revolution is the purification of the administration of justice in political cases.  Of the importance of this change no person can judge who is not well acquainted with the earlier volumes of the State Trials.  Those volumes are, we do not hesitate to say, the most frightful record of baseness and depravity that is extant in the world.  Our hatred is altogether turned away from the crimes and the criminals, and directed against the law and its ministers.  We see villanies as black as ever were imputed to any