In publishing this volume occasion is taken to state the purpose of the competition. Since it is confined to students and graduates of a college which offers no post-graduate instruction, it is not intended to require original historical research but rather to encourage a thoughtful handling of problems in political science. THEODORE CLARKE SMITH, J. Leland Miller Professor of American History WILLIAMS COLLEGE, WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS., December, 1910. INTRODUCTION IN a chapter of Hall’s Chronicle having to do with the mid-reign history of Henry VIII occurs an instance of popular protest against arbitrary taxation. The people are complaining against the Commissions, says the Chronicler, bodies appointed by the Crown to levy taxes without consent of Parliament. “For thei saied,” so goes the passage, “if men should geue their goodes by a Commission, then wer it worse than the taxes of Fraunce, and so England should be bond and not free.” Hall’s naïve statement is scarcely less than a declaration of the axiomatic principle of politics that self-taxation is an essential of self-government. Writers on the evolution of the taxing power are inclined to go a step farther and believe that the liberty of a nation can be gauged most readily by the power of the people over the public purse. With a view so extended a narrative of the growth of popular control in England might easily expand into a history of the English Constitution. In the present essay, however, an effort has been made to exclude all matters which were not of the strictest pertinency to the subject in hand. Feudal dues and incidents, the machinery of taxation, the Exchequer, the forces accounting for the shifting composition of the national assemblies, these and other matters have been treated of in outline rather than in detail, because they appeared to lie beyond the scope of this essay. Only two matters have been taken to be of first rate importance,--the tax and the authority by which it was laid. Taxation has been construed broadly as being any contribution levied by the government for its own support. An endeavor has been made in each instance to find out who or what the taxing authority was, and whether the tax was laid in accordance with it. Under the Normans the taxing authority was unmistakably the king, and by the Bill of Rights it lay as unmistakably in Parliament, with the right of initiation in the House of Commons. The story of the shift from one position to the other forms, of course, the major burden of the essay.