Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/624

604 the purpose of enforcing morality, or as an instrumentality for correction or punishment.

Sixth. No tax should be levied the character and extent of which offer, as human nature is generally constituted, a greater inducement to the taxpayer to evade rather than pay.

With a view of determining whether the above six propositions are so far fundamental and indisputable as to warrant their characterization as "economic axioms," attention is next asked to the following summary of reasons, or evidence to that effect, which may be separately adduced in respect to each one of them, commencing with the first—that no tax should be imposed by a state or government except by the consent of the people from whom it is to be collected, given either directly or by their authorized representatives in Congress, Legislature, or Parliament assembled. "The right is then wedded to the power, and representation and taxation become correlative." (Miller, Justice S. F., on the Constitution.)

It requires no great amount of thought to see that the principle involved in this proposition is not only an essential feature of every just system of taxation, but also the primary and essential condition of the existence of every system of free or popular government. If this is not at once apparent, the following brief historical retrospect ought to make it so:

The first great effort recorded in English history for its recognition and establishment as a fundamental principle of government was made by the English barons in 1215, in their notable struggle with King John, and resulted in the incorporation in the Great Charter (Magna Charta) of England of a provision which substantially forbade the king from imposing any taxes, except by permission of the General Council of the nation, duly summoned under writs regularly issued. And it is interesting to note, as showing the broad spirit of generous patriotism that animated these rough old barons in their contest with King John, that they stipulated in the Magna Charta that they extorted from him that every limitation imposed in it for their protection upon the feudal rights of the king should be also imposed upon their rights as mesne lords (i. e., lords superior in the second degree) in favor of the undertenants who held of them.

In the many confirmations of the Great Charter in the ensuing reigns of Henry III and Edward I, its vital clauses as to