But notwithstanding the early restrictions imposed by Parliament on the power of the crown to appropriate the property of the people for its support, arbitrary exactions in the name of taxation continued to characterize the rule of all the English monarch s down to the time of Charles I, when the claim of the king to a divine right to take taxes from subjects, with or without their consent, was settled by the dethronement and execution of the monarch and the establishment of the Commonwealth: and ever since then the grants of an annual Parliament have been a prerequisite to any lawful expenditure for the maintenance of the English state.
To the necessities of the Long Parliament, during its contest with the crown, and when the receipts of revenue from former sources were interrupted, we owe the permanent incorporation of the so-called excise taxes into the tax system of England. Another most novel contrivance of this period for the raising of revenue was the so-called weekly impost of a single meal; every citizen being required to retrench one meal per week and pay an amount representing the saving, in the form of money, into the public treasury; a tax that yielded in six years £608,400, or more than $3,000,000; an aggregate that represented a far larger purchasing power than the same amount would at present.
During the nineteen years that elapsed from the beginning of the English Revolution to the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, the average annual expenditures of the Commonwealth were about seven times greater than those of the preceding royal Government; and as unlawful taxation was the prime cause of the establishment of the Commonwealth, so excessive taxation furnished the prime cause of popular rejoicing when the Commonwealth was got rid of.
A circumstance of no little importance, but which historians generally have overlooked, is, that the revolt of the American colonies and their separation from Great Britain, were in the first instance due to an effort on the part of the landholders of Great Britain to transfer from themselves to the people an ever-increasing portion of the expenses of the Government. But such was the fact. In 1767 the British Parliament, which was mainly composed of landholders, reduced the previously existing land tax to the extent of about half a million pounds per annum; and it was for the purpose of making up a resulting deficiency of receipts to the British treasury, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer of George III resorted to the taxation of tea, glass, and other articles imported into the American colonies, as well as the requirement for the use of stamps on the paper instrumentalities used by the Americans, and the payment for which the colonists resisted.
