438 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



in this he was historically correct or not, his utterances respecting 

 the effect of such abuse are as pertinent to-day as ever, and in 

 some respects remarkably applicable to the depression that in 

 recent years has come to one great department of the domestic 

 industries of the United States through injudicious taxation of 

 the crude material wool that constitutes its foundation : 



" The subject's grief 



Comes through commissions, which compel from each 

 The sixth part of his substance, to be levied 

 Without delay ; . . . this makes bold mouths : 

 Tongues spit their duties out; and it's come to pass, 

 This tractable obedience is a slave 

 To each incensed will."' 

 " For, upon these taxations, 

 The clothiers all, not able to maintain 

 The many to them 'longing, have put off 

 The spinsters, carders, fullers, weavers, who, 

 Unfit for other life, compelled by hunger, 

 And lack of other means, in desperate manner 

 Daring the event to the teeth, are all in an uproar, 

 And Danger serves among them." 



The great revolution in England (1642-1659), by which the con- 

 stitutional rights of her people were finally established, wherein 

 Charles I lost both his crown and his head, was caused by a 

 question of taxation. And subsequently the attempt of Great 

 Britain to tax her American colonies without their consent was 

 also the primary cause of the American Revolution ; * while later 

 the demonstrated inability of maintaining a harmonious and effi- 

 cient government under the Articles of Confederation, which per- 



* Recent historical investigations (by Prof. Tyler) have shown that the demand "no taxa- 

 tion without representation," which has been popularly regarded as one of the prime causes 

 that contributed to the revolt of the British American colonies in 1775 and their subsequent 

 independence, " did not mean that the colonies could not be lawfully taxed by Parliament 

 when they had no representatives in Parliament. It was a demand applicable to the three 

 orders of the English body politic king, lords, and commons and meant that the com- 

 mons could not be taxed when they were not represented. But the commons represented 

 the cities of Leeds, Halifax, Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool in Parliament, al- 

 though none of them had any vote or personal representation in it at the time of the Ameri- 

 can revolt or for a long tune afterward. Indeed, only one tenth of the people of the 

 United Kingdom had then any vote. The commons represented Massachusetts in the same 

 way that they represented Manchester. That this was an unsatisfactory kind of representa- 

 tion will be admitted without argument, but it was not in contravention of the maxim 

 quoted, which has come down to us as a legal justification for the war. It would have 

 been strange indeed if the English Constitution had contained within itself a justification 

 for breaking up the British Empire." The separation of the colonies from the .mother 

 country was therefore not a legal step, but an act of revolution, and suggests a remark 

 attributed to Mr. Lincoln at the outbreak of our civil war, that " it was a constitutional 

 procedure for overthrowing the Constitution." 



