n the citizen seems
to have comprehended the spirit of our constitution--that taxes should
not be raised without the consent of parliament!

Charles the First, amidst his urgent wants, at first had hoped, by the
pathetic appeal to _benevolences_, that he should have touched the
hearts of his unfriendly commoners; but the term of _benevolence_ proved
unlucky. The resisters of _taxation_ took full advantage of a
significant meaning, which had long been lost in the custom: asserting
by this very term that all levies of money were not compulsory, but the
voluntary gifts of the people. In that political crisis, when in the
fulness of time all the national grievances which had hitherto been kept
down started up with one voice, the courteous term strangely contrasted
with the rough demand. Lord Digby said "the granting of _subsidies_,
under so preposterous a name as of a _benevolence_, was a
_malevolence_." And Mr. Grimstone observed, that "they have granted a
benevolence, but the nature of the _thing_ agrees not with the _name_."
The nature indeed had so entirely changed from the name, that when James
I. had tried to warm the hearts of his "benevolent" people, he got
"little money, and lost a great deal of love." "Subsidies," that is
grants made by parliament, observes Arthur Wilson, a dispassionate
historian, "get more of the people's money, but exactions enslave the
mind."

When _benevolences_ had become a grievance, to diminish the odium they
invented more inviting phrases. The subject was cautiously informed that
the sums demanded were only _loans_; or he was honoured by a letter
under the _Privy Seal_; a bond which the king engaged to repay at a
definite period; but privy seals at length got to be hawked about to
persons coming out of church. "Privy Seals," says a manuscript letter,
"are flying thick and threefold in sight of all the world, which might
surely have been better performed in delivering them to every man
privately at home." The _general loan_, which in fact was a forced loan,
was one of the most crying grievances under Charles I. Ingenious in the
destruction of his own popularity, the king contrived a new mode of
"_secret instructions to commissioners_."[130] They were to find out
persons who could bear the largest rates. How the commissioners were to
acquire this secret and inquisitorial knowledge appears in the bungling
contrivance. It is one of their orders that after a number of inquiries
have been put