In the controversies in regard to taxation subsequently arising, whether in parliament, in the courts, or in the forum of public opinion, it was always insisted that Magna Carta prevented taxation without the consent of parliament, just as in the eighteenth century our ancestors contended that Magna Carta prevented taxation without representation, that is, prevented the imposition of taxes except by a legislative body in which the taxpayers were represented. We have only to refer to the arguments in the great constitutional cases before the courts of England in the seventeenth century, such as the famous case of Impositions in the reign of James I. and the still more famous case of Ship-Money in the reign of Charles I., to realize how much the people relied upon Magna Carta as establishing the doctrine that parliament alone could impose taxes. The counsel for Bate in the former case and for Hampden in the latter case may not have apprehended the philosophical theory of the separation of governmental powers elaborated by Montesquieu in the next century, and they may not have contended that taxation was essentially a legislative function and, therefore, could not be exercised by the king; but in final analysis they affirmed these principles when they asserted that parliament alone could impose taxes. The judgment of a majority of the court in the Ship-Money case, as had been the judgment in the case of Impositions, was in favor of the crown, but the appeal to the country cost Charles I. his head and ultimately resulted in vesting in parliament the exclusive power to legislate and hence to tax. If England had then had an independent judiciary charged with the duty of enforcing the fundamental law of the land, the levying of the taxes in both of these cases would have been held contrary to the letter, as it was certainly contrary to the spirit, of Magna Carta. It is no answer to say that the parliament of to-day finds its prototype not in the old common council referred to in Magna Carta, but in the parliament of 1265, nor is it an answer to say that the idea of taxation in its abstract form is essentially modern and was quite unknown in 1215. I do not suggest that the people of England in 1215 or even in 1265 understood the virtues of the representative system, or the principles of taxation or of the separation of powers. The point is that the direct consequence of the provisions of Magna Carta was a parliament based, theoretically at least, on the representative idea as well as on the principle that there could be no legislation without the consent of parliament. The most famous of all the chapters of Magna Carta and the most important and far-reaching from a juridical point of view is undoubtedly the thirty-ninth, which provides that "no freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land."