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4i 8 Morgan: Parliamentary Taxation
important from this point of view. The Great Charter was, of course,
the first great step in taking the control of taxation away from the king.
Edwards I.'s reign was of very great importance, both because the Model
Parliament furnished a machine through which the people could assent to
taxation, and because Confirmatio Cartarum provided that certain taxes
were only to be taken *
by the common assent of all the realm.'
At the end of Edward's reign, therefore, much had been gained, but still
the consent of Parliament was not required for
every tax ; and the questions
of the initiation of taxation by the House of Commons and of the relationship
of the redress of grievances to the granting of supplies were still unsettled.
Acts were wrung from Edward III. making Parliament the sole
authority for levying taxation but ; the principle, though declared, was not
really established. The Tudor period was not a time of growth of Parliamentary
powers, but the principles enunciated survived, and were again
asserted under the Stewarts. Mr. Morgan ignores the taxation during the
Interregnum, though the financial embarrassment of the Protectorate was
considerable, and helped to make it unpopular. The Bill of Rights finally
asserts the principle of the power of Parliament rather than the Crown to
tax. The essay was written before the rejection of the Budget by the
House of Lords, and therefore that question is not considered.
THEODORA KEITH.
THE CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY. Volume XII. THE LATEST AGE.
Edited by A. W. Ward, Litt.D., G. W. Prothero, Litt.D., and
Stanley Leathes, M.A. Pp. xxxiv, 1033. 8vo. Cambridge: University
Press. 1910. 1 6s. nett.
THIS monumental volume of contemporary history is, on account of the
proximity of its publication to the period it describes, perhaps the most
difficult to review of all the portions of the great work of which it is the
culmination. The scope has in a manner changed. The history has
become by natural expansion not only the history of the European States
and Colonies but that of the whole world.
Since 1871, Western Europe, this volume points out, has enjoyed peace.
It has been an armed peace however, and has been by no means without
vast political changes. The commercial rise of Germany is one of the
most important and far-reaching of these. France has become a settled
republic and a rising African Parliamentary crises, and the
power. Britain has had her Boer
perennial question of Ireland to
War,
solve.
Austria-Hungary has, race conflicts notwithstanding, increased her terri-
tory, and Italy is recovering from the folly of the Abyssinian War. Spain
has lost her colonies, and suffers from anti-clerical unrest, while Portugal
has (unforeseen in the Iberian chapter before us) become the youngest
European republic. Norway never (as ' '
Mr. Fudge said) * on a bed of
roses' in her forced union with Sweden, has by a bloodless revolution
separated herself. The uninitiated will find much food for thought in the
two valuable chapters on reaction and reform in Russia, while the chapter
on Turkey shows that the * sick man '
has not been so fortunate as Western