e _frequency_ is again reduced to a
certainty by statute 6 W. & M. c. 2. which enacts, as the statute of
Charles the second had done before, that a new parliament shall be
called within three years[m] after the determination of the former.

[Footnote l: 4 Edw. III. c. 14. and 36 Edw. III. c. 10.]

[Footnote m: This is the same period, that is allowed in Sweden for
intermitting their general diets, or parliamentary assemblies. Mod.
Un. Hist. xxxiii. 15.]

II. THE constituent parts of a parliament are the next objects of our
enquiry. And these are, the king's majesty, sitting there in his royal
political capacity, and the three estates of the realm; the lords
spiritual, the lords temporal, (who sit, together with, the king, in
one house) and the commons, who sit by themselves in another[n]. And
the king and these three estates, together, form the great corporation
or body politic of the kingdom, of which the king is said to be
_caput, principium, et finis_. For upon their coming together the king
meets them, either in person or by representation; without which there
can be no beginning of a parliament[o]; and he also has alone the
power of dissolving them.

[Footnote n: 4 Inst. 1.]

[Footnote o: 4 Inst. 6.]

IT is highly necessary for preserving the ballance of the
constitution, that the executive power should be a branch, though not
the whole, of the legislature. The total union of them, we have seen,
would be productive of tyranny; the total disjunction of them for the
present, would in the end produce the same effects, by causing that
union, against which it seems to provide. The legislature would soon
become tyrannical, by making continual encroachments, and gradually
assuming to itself the rights of the executive power. Thus the long
parliament of Charles the first, while it acted in a constitutional
manner, with the royal concurrence, redressed many heavy grievances
and established many salutary laws. But when the two houses assumed
the power of legislation, in exclusion of the royal authority, they
soon after assumed likewise the reins of administration; and, in
consequence of these united powers, overturned both church and state,
and established a worse oppression than any they pretended to remedy.
To hinder therefore any such encroachments, the king is himself a part
of the parliament: and, as this is the reason of his being so, very
properly therefore the share of legislation, which the constitution
has