Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/480

438 in this he was historically correct or not, his utterances respecting the effect of such abuse are as pertinent to-day as ever, and in some respects remarkably applicable to the depression that in recent years has come to one great department of the domestic industries of the United States through injudicious taxation of the crude material—wool—that constitutes its foundation:

 "The subject's grief Comes through commissions, which compel from each The sixth part of his substance, to be levied Without delay; . . . this makes bold mouths: Tongues spit their duties out; and it's come to pass, This tractable obedience is a slave To each incensed will." "For, upon these taxations, The clothiers all, not able to maintain The many to them 'longing, have put off The spinsters, carders, fullers, weavers, who, Unfit for other life, compelled by hunger. And lack of other means, in desperate manner Daring the event to the teeth, are all in an uproar. And Danger serves among them."

The great revolution in England (1642-1659), by which the constitutional rights of her people were finally established, wherein Charles I lost both his crown and his head, was caused by a question of taxation. And subsequently the attempt of Great Britain to tax her American colonies without their consent was also the primary cause of the American Revolution; while later the demonstrated inability of maintaining a harmonious and efficient government under the Articles of Confederation, which