[113:2] It may be observed that for many years after 1868 the Postmaster General was rarely in the cabinet, and hence he has not acquired the authority possessed by a regular cabinet minister. He has, however, now been in the cabinet continuously since 1892. CHAPTER V THE TREASURY The most important of all the departments, and the one that exhibits in the highest degree the merits of the English government, is the Treasury. It is the central department of the administration, which keeps in touch with all the others, and maintains a constant financial control over them. But before considering how that is done it may be well to explain the process by which money flows in and out of the national purse. The part played by Parliament in the imposition of taxes, and the authorisation of expenditure by means of appropriations, will be described in chapter XIV, and we are concerned here only with the machinery for collecting those taxes, and giving effect to the appropriations.[115:1] [Sidenote: The Consolidated Fund and the Bank of England.] Until the Commonwealth, taxes were, as a rule, granted to the King, who used the proceeds to carry on the government as he saw fit; but under Charles II. Parliament began to appropriate parts of the revenue for specific purposes, and after the revolution of 1688 this developed into a comprehensive system, so that the whole revenue was appropriated, to be used only for the objects, and in the sums, designated by Parliament.[115:2] It was the custom, however, to appropriate for specific objects the proceeds of particular taxes, a practice that made the public accounts needlessly complex. In 1787 William Pitt, following earlier partial experiments, simplified matters by creating a single Consolidated Fund into which all revenues from every source were turned, and from which all payments were made.[116:1] The Consolidated Fund is deposited in the Bank of England and the Bank of Ireland, which have a right to use it like any other deposit, and perform, in fact, for the government much the same service that an ordinary bank does for a merchant. This method of dealing with the national finances continued substantially intact until a few years ago,[116:2] when it was complicated by two innovations, one of which allows a department to use incidental revenues, under the name of "appropriations in aid," to defray expenses, and the other sets aside certain parts of the national income to supplement local taxation, in each case without passing through the Consolidated Fund.[116:3] The second of these exceptions is due to the great increase of local expenditure, and the narrow range of local taxation, which have caused a demand for national subventions, and have resulted in setting apart for the purpose the proceeds of specific sources of revenue. In this way the income from the local taxation licenses, and a portion of the income from the death duties and the