Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/12

 two in a House of three hundred Members—one hundred and fifty-one to one hundred and fortynine—many Members urging in the strongest terms the injustice of the measure.

This critic goes on to say: "If Mr. Bright had been then alive he might fairly have urged the justice of commuting an obsolete burden for a moderate land-tax; but the latter impost, which still exists under that name, furnishes an ample equivalent for one of the least productive revenues which belonged to the Crown."

The answer to this is that a question which all through the reign of James I. occupied very much of the time and attention of the Parliament was the mode of getting rid of the feudal tenures. The same hand which drew the Petition of Right drew up an account of a motion made at the Parliament in the eighteenth year of the reign of James I. for commuting the feudal tenures and payments into a "competent yearly rent, to be assured to his Majesty, his heirs, and successors" (4 Inst., 202, 203). This motion Coke stamps with his approbation, "hoping that so good a