Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/625

Rh taxation and the National Council were, however, invariably and intentionally omitted; and the latter king so reasserted the taxing power of the crown as to alarm the nation and occasion a revolution (Barons' War, 1297), which for many subsequent years prevented any like assumption on the part of Edward's successors. Under the reign of Charles I the authority to levy and collect taxes in England was, however, again claimed—as it was in all the other European states—to be vested exclusively in the king; and on the trial of John Hampden, in 1636, for his refusal to pay a tax known as "ship money," arbitrarily levied by the king for the maintenance of a naval force, this was the position taken by the crown lawyers representing the prosecution and accepted as valid by the judges in their verdict, the attorney general using in his plea language almost identical with that employed by Louis XIV, before cited, in defining his prerogative. (See Popular Science Monthly, No. 2, page 146, December, 1896.)

But when absolutism in government was overthrown in England in 1653, and a constitutional government established, no one principle was recognized as more fundamental than that the executive could levy no taxes except such as had been granted by the people taxed, through their representatives; and one of the very first statutes enacted by Parliament in 1689, under the reign of William and Mary, and accepted by the crown, was that all levying of money for the crown by pretense of prerogative should be hereafter and forever illegal; and next, in the latter third of the next century (1770), the unqualified affirmation and defense of the principle that those who pay the taxes should control the levying of them became the primary cause of the American Revolution, and eventuated in calling the United States into existence. And hence, by reason of such experiences, it has become a part of the common law of all English-speaking people that the taxing power inherent in the state is vested exclusively in the legislative department of its government.

Second. All taxes or enforced contributions levied by a state in virtue of its sovereignty should be solely (singly) and exclusively for public purposes.

Another and perhaps a more popular way of expressing this principle would be, to put it in the form of an affirmation, namely: All taxes that the people pay, the government should receive.

All recognized authorities, judicial and economic, are agreed in regarding the above proposition as in the light of a political axiom from which there can be no rational dissent. From a great number of confirmatory and illustrative legal opinions and decisions the following are especially worthy of attention:

"No State government, nor that of the United States, nor any other authority professing a regard for the rights of the people,