Popular Law-making by Frederic Jesup Stimson
page 35 of 492 (07%)
page 35 of 492 (07%)
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[Footnote 1: Stubbs's "Charters," p. 62.] But after the Conquest laws could only be enacted with the concurrence of the king; and the phrase was, and is still, in form, that "the king wills it"--_Le Roy le veult_. Nevertheless, Parliament usually originated laws. The early Norman kings cared nothing about legislation; their sole desire was to get money from the people. For two centuries, therefore, Parliament was occupied only with laws recognizing the old Anglo-Saxon laws previously existing, or laws removing abuses of the royal power; and the desire of the king to tax the people was used as the lever to get him to assent to these laws. With the usual sensible indifference of the English race to mere matters of form, they allowed the Norman kings to go on declaring the laws and signing them as if they were made only by the crown, which was the Norman theory--not caring for the shadow, if they could get the substance. Thus they established, in the first two or three centuries, the right to force legislation on the king, and they did it by the instrument of the taxation power. For taxation must be "by the common consent of the realm"; no taxation without representation, as the Declaration of Independence puts it, is probably the earliest principle of the English Constitution; and it is most significant to the student of the constitutional law, a most necessary reminder to those who do not value our Constitution, that it was the departure by George III from this very earliest of English constitutional principles that caused the loss of his American empire. This was six hundred years old, therefore, at the time of our Revolution. Except those two principles, taxation by common consent |
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