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PARLIAMENTARY CONTROL OF THE ADMINISTRATION 407 2 Univers 
They passed Acts appointing commissioners’ to enquire into AY Ass Hi el 
administrative corruption. They had already secured full & 
control over the collection of the customs? and they were L & a6: 
on the point of creating a permanent Board of Trade of over 
4 . . ’ wv 4 trading 
their own, with the view of maintaining the same sort of afairs, 
supervision over commercial affairs as had been hitherto 
exercised by the Privy Council. “In the end when all the 
errors with relation to the protection of our trade were set 
out, and much aggravated, a motion was made to create, by 
Act of Parliament, a council of trade. 
«This was opposed by those who looked on it as a 
change of our constitution in a very essential point: the 
sxecutive part of the Government was wholly in the King: 
so that the appointing any council by Act of Parliament 
began a precedent of their breaking in upon the execution 
of the law, in which it could not be easy to see how far they 
might be carried; it was indeed offered, that this council 
should be much limited as to its powers; yet many appre- 
hended, that if the Parliament named the persons, howsoever 
low their powers might be at first, they would be enlarged 
{ 18 W. IIL. c. 1. A dispute arose between the two Houses over this matter. 
Parl. I7ist. v. 1321. The Lords had amended the bill and omitted the name of 
Edmund Whitaker, the solicitor to the Admiralty, who had failed to give any 
account of £25,000 of public money. See also Davenant’s Picture, Works, Iv. 165. 
1 «We do not find, after the Restoration, the Crown in possession of a revenue 
consisting in part of a prescriptive duty on all merchandise, and also of an increase 
shereof by grant of Parliament known as a subsidy, the whole of which is collected 
by its own chosen methods, and administered at its own discretion for the public 
good. On the contrary, this former item of the sovereign’s income had come to 
be regarded as part of the revenue of the State, assessed by authority of Parliament 
ilone in the person of its Speaker, and collected more or less directly by an official 
lepartment responsible not to the sovereign alone, as heretofore, but to the nation. 
During the reigns of the two first Stuart kings the Customs at the ports had been 
sollected by farmers, an ancient, obnoxious, unprofitable expedient, and one which 
bore no resemblance to the lucrative tyranny of the system which prevailed under 
the same title on the Continent. Under the Commonwealth, however, this plan 
was completely changed, and the revenue derived from the new Parliamentary 
Oustoms was placed under the control of commissioners. Even after the Restora- 
tion, the same device (like most other financial reforms of the late régime) was 
continued, and was only changed in 1670 for a still more responsible method. 
From that date to the Revolution the gross income of the Customs was answered, 
lo the country by a Receiver-General, who was associated from the year 1688 with 
a Comptroller-General; and in this way the most fruitful branch of the ancient 
revenue of the Crown was converted from a source of royal income into a fund 
*harged with some portion or other of the working expenses of the State.’ Hall, 
Iistory of the Customs Revenue, 1. 189.