Finally, a feature of special importance in connection with the history of English tax experiences, one often overlooked in historical essays and discussions, but which ought to command the attention of all interested in the origin of the structure and diversities of governments, is the demonstration it affords of the close connection between taxation and popular liberty. Take up the history of any people, state, or nation that has fought its way, like England, out of despotism into liberty, and what are the transactions that most significantly mark and constitute its progress? The story is substantially the same in every case. First, a government of might supported by arbitrary exactions from persons and property—tribute, taille, scutage, gahelle, corvée, escheats, octroi, vingtième, customs duties, subsidies, benevolences, and the like—levied at the will or caprice of an absolute and despotic chief or monarch, and without any consultation with or assent of the governed. Then, in some hour of royal adversity or need, the monarch appeals for aid to the more powerful of his subjects—lords and nobles—who, in turn, taking advantage of the situation, vote or grant it, in consideration of the concession of some "Magna Charta," limiting in a measure the sphere of exactions on the part of the monarch, or at least securing to a few of his privileged subordinates a voice in regulating and legalizing the same. Later comes the struggle between the privileged few and the unprivileged many, and sooner or later, by peaceful political progress, or by violence and revolution, the privileged class ceases to be a separate potential element of the state, and thence passes to the people the sole right to determine, through their chosen representatives, what grants of supplies shall be made for the support of the state, and how the burden of taxation which they entail shall be distributed. And then, if further progress is to be achieved, to the end that in exercising the great power of appropriating private property for defraying the expenses of government, no more be taken than is necessary; that none shall be assessed unequally; that the greatest freedom may be secured for production and distribution, and the greatest restrictions placed on monopolies, there must be, through study and investigation, such an improvement and remodeling of all existing systems of taxation as will completely eliminate from them all practices that rest upon no better basis than old prejudices and narrow, selfish interests, and make them conformable to principles and conditions which, when presented abstractly, will command almost universal assent.
