REPRESENTATIVE BODIES. 589 



imposing undue exactions ; and as wlien, on sundry occasions, the 

 States-General was assembled for the purpose of reconciling the nation 

 to imposts levied to carry on wars. Kor must its familiarity cause us 

 to omit the instance furnished by our own history, when, after pre- 

 liminary steps toward that end at St. Alban's and St. Edmund's, 

 nobles and people at Runnymede effectually restrained the king from 

 various tyrannies, and, among others, from that of imposing taxes 

 without the consent of his subjects. 



And now what followed from arrangements which, with modifica- 

 tions due to local conditions, were arrived at in several countries 

 under similar circumstances? Evidently, when the king, hindered 

 from enforcing unauthorized demands, had to obtain supplies by ask- 

 ing his subjects, or the more powerful of them, his motive for sum- 

 moning them, or their representatives, became primarily that of get- 

 ting these supplies. The predominance of this motive for calling 

 together national assemblies may be inferred from its predominance, 

 previously shown in connection with local assemblies ; as instance a 

 writ of Henry I concerning shire- moots, in which, professing to re- 

 store ancient custom, he says : " I will cause those courts to be sum- 

 moned when I will for my ovm sovereign necessity, at my pleasure." 

 To vote money is therefore the j)rimary purpose for which chief men 

 and representatives are assembled. 



From the ability to prescribe conditions under which money will 

 be voted, grows the ability, and finally the right, to join in legislation. 

 This connection is vaguely typified in early stages of social evolution. 

 Making gifts and getting redress go together from the beginning. As 

 was said ' of Gulab Singh, when treating of presents, " even in a 

 crowd one could catch his eye by holding up a rupee and crying out, 

 ' Maharajah, a petition.' He would pounce down like a hawk on the 

 money, and, having appropriated it, would patiently hear out the peti- 

 tioner." I have in the same place given further examples of this re- 

 lation between yielding support to the governing agency and de- 

 manding protection from it ; and the examples there given may be 

 enforced by such others as that, among ourselves in early days, " the 

 king's court itself, though the supreme judicature of the kingdom, 

 was open to none that brought not presents to the king," and that, 

 as shown by the exchequer rolls, every remedy for a grievance or 

 security against aggression had to be paid for by a bribe ; a state of 

 things which, as Hume remarks, was paralleled on the Continent. 



Such being the primitive connection between support of the 

 political head and protection by the political head, the interpreta- 

 tion of the actions of parliamentary bodies, when they arise, becomes 

 clear. Just as, in rude assemblies of king, military chiefs, and 

 armed freemen, preserving in large measure the original form, as 

 those in France during the Merovingian period, the presentation of 



