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 to a person, concerning others who had spoken against loan-money, and what arguments they had used, this person was to be charged in his majesty's name, and upon his allegiance, not to disclose to any other the answer he had given. A striking instance of that fatuity of the human mind, when a weak government is trying to do what it knows not how to perform: it was seeking to obtain a secret purpose by the most open and general means: a self-destroying principle! Our ancestors were children in finance; their simplicity has been too often described as tyranny! but from my soul do I believe, on this obscure subject of taxation, that old Burleigh's advice to Elizabeth includes more than all the squabbling pamphlets of our political economists,--"WIN HEARTS, AND YOU HAVE THEIR HANDS AND PURSES!" FOOTNOTES: [122] Cowel's "Interpreter," art. _Acephali_. This by-name we unexpectedly find in a grave antiquarian law-dictionary! probably derived from Pliny's description of a people whom some travellers had reported to have found in this predicament, in their fright and haste in attempting to land on a hostile shore among savages. To account for this fabulous people, it has been conjectured they wore such high coverings, that their heads did not appear above their shoulders, while their eyes seemed to be placed in their breasts. How this name came to be introduced into the laws of Henry the First remains to be told by some profound antiquary; but the allusion was common in the middle ages. Cowel says, "Those are called _acephali_ who were the _levellers_ of that age, and acknowledged _no head_ or superior."