Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/813

Rh explicitly reaffirmed and embodied in the form of law by a Parliament in 1297, which enacted that no tax should be levied by the king without the consent of the knights, burgesses, and citizens in Parliament assembled.

Again, in the earlier periods of English history, and probably also in the history of the other states of Europe, when the revenues from the property, fees, and perquisites of the crown, supplemented as they were from time to time by special parliamentary grants, benevolences, and subsidies, and the plunder of special classes—as the Jews—were found inconvenient and unreliable, and were replaced by more regular systems of contribution, the idea of taxation was, as centuries before in Rome, simply to obtain the necessary revenue, without much regard to the incidence of the tax or the interest of the producer, consumer, or trader. The end was alone considered, and not the means; and this policy, pervading all schemes and experiences of taxation, was then, as it ever has been, the most fertile source of bad taxes. The objects from which contributions at the period under consideration could be obtained were almost exclusively tangible and readily visible, as lands, hearths (representing houses), cattle, slaves or serfs, and the crudest of agricultural products. But as trade, or the business of exchanging, increased, it soon came to be looked upon as a proper subject for exaction. Customs, or taxes upon trade, were accordingly very early established, and at first were probably confined to domestic or internal trade. But with the rise and growth of foreign commerce the practice very naturally extended to foreign trade, and the terms "customs" and "duties," which had an antecedent origin and meaning, eventually became restricted in their application to "taxes" or "exactions" on exports and imports. But yet so slowly did the customs in this sense become an important source of English revenue, that the entire amount collected in 1603 was but £127,000, or but little in excess of $600,000. Such taxes at the outset were furthermore held to be the king's private or personal dues, to be levied by him independently of any statute, according to his discretion, or, rather, according to his necessities; and it was not until the reign of Edward I that Parliament undertook to interfere with what had been considered an hereditary right of the crown, by providing in 1275, that for the purpose of correcting irregular seizures and exactions, a limitation should be established on the amount of duty that the king might take on the exports of wool and leather; and the duties thus regulated by statute on these two articles are regarded as the first legal foundation of the English customs revenue. But before the close of the reign of Edward III, or in 1353, the exclusive right of Parliament to authorize or control every form of indirect taxation was fully