Note (Back) — Chapter V
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The rules in this connection upon which the Commons insisted have been summarized as follows: (1) The Lords ought not to initiate any legislative proposal embodied in a public bill and imposing a charge on the people, whether by taxes, rates, or otherwise, or regulating the administration or application of money raised by such a charge, and (2) the Lords ought not to amend any such legislative proposal by altering the amount of a charge, or its incidence, duration, mode of assessment, levy or collection, or the administration or application of money raised by such a charge.[152] These rules, although not embodied in any law or standing order, were through centuries so generally observed in the usage of the two houses that they became for all practical purposes, a part of the constitutional system—conventional, it is true, but none the less binding. From their observance it resulted (1) that the upper chamber was never consulted about the annual estimates, about the amounts of money to be raised, or about the purposes to which those amounts should be appropriated; (2) that proposals of taxation came before it only in matured form and under circumstances which discouraged criticism; and (3) that, since the policy of the executive is controlled largely through the medium of the power of the purse, the upper house lost entirely the means of exercising such control. In 1860 the Lords, as has been mentioned, made bold to reject a bill for the repeal of the duties on paper; but the occasion was seized by the Commons to pass a resolution reaffirming vigorously the subordination of the second chamber in finance, and the next year the repeal of the paper duties was incorporated in the annual budget and forced through. Thereafter it became the invariable practice to give place to all proposals of taxation in the one grand Finance Bill of the year, with the effect, of course, of depriving the Lords of the opportunity to defeat a proposal of the kind save by rejecting the whole of the measure of which it formed a part.[153]