Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/609

Rh promised that no scutage or aid, save those which were established, should be imposed without consent of the national council, there perpetually recurred, both before and after the expansion of Parliament, endeavors on the king's part to get supplies without redressing grievances, and endeavors on the part of Parliament to make the voting of supplies contingent on fulfillment of promises to redress grievances.

On the issue of this struggle depended the establishment of popular power, as we are shown by comparing the histories of the French and Spanish Parliaments with that of the English Parliament. Quotations above given prove that the Cortes originally established, and for a time maintained, the right to comply with or to refuse the king's requests for money, and to impose their conditions; but they eventually failed to get their conditions fulfilled.

In the struggling condition of Spanish liberty under Charles I, the Crown began to neglect answering the petitions of Cortes, or to use unsatisfactory generalities of expression. This gave rise to many remonstrances. The deputies insisted, in 1523, on having answers before they granted money. They repeated the same contention in 1525, and obtained a general law, inserted in the Recopilacion, enacting that the king should answer all their petitions before he dissolved the assembly. This, however, was disregarded as before.

And thereafter rapidly went on the decay of parliamentary power. Different in form, but the same in nature, was the change which occurred in France. Having at one time, as shown above, made the granting of money conditional on the obtainment of justice, the States-General was induced to surrender its restraining powers. Charles VII

obtained from the states of the royal domains which met in 1439 that they [the tallies] should be declared permanent, and from 1444 he levied them as such—i. e., uninterruptedly and without previous vote. . . . The permanence of the tallies was extended to the provinces annexed to the crown, but these preserved the right of voting them by their provincial states. . . . In the hands of Charles VII and Louis XI the royal impost tended to be freed from all control. . . . Its amount increased more and more.

Whence, as related by Dareste, it resulted that, "when the tallies and aides. . . had been made permanent, the convocation of the States-General ceased to be necessary. They were little more than show assemblies." But, in our own case, during the century succeeding the final establishment of Parliament, continued struggles necessitated by royal evasions, trickeries, and falsehoods, brought an increasing power to withhold supplies until petitions had been attended to.

Admitting that this issue was furthered by the conflicts of political factions, which diminished the coercive power of the king, the truth to be emphasized is that the increase of a free industrial