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 and taxation for the common benefit—­which latter was not finally established until two hundred years later (that is, it was put in the first Magna Charta, John’s, and then quietly dropped out by Henry II, and kept out of the charter for nearly one hundred years),—­we have to come down to the year 1100 before we find the first sociological statute.  “Henry I called another convention of all the estates of the realm to sit in his royal palace at London ... the prohibiting the priests the use of their wives and concubines was considered, and the bishops and clergy granted to the king the correction of them for that offence; by which means he raised vast sums of money compounding with the priests...."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Cobbett’s “Parliamentary History of England,” I, 4.]

In 1 Henry, cap.  VII, is another recognition of personal property—­it says that at a man’s death it is to be divided between his widow and his heirs.  Now that may seem commonplace enough; but it is interesting to note, as in the law, personal property did not come first; property in land was many centuries earlier.  And this suggests the legal basis and present tendency of the law of property.  “Property exists only by the law”; and extreme socialists say that all private property is robbery.  No law, no property; this is true.  Property is an artificial thing.  It is a creation of law.  In other words, where there is now no law except statute, it is the creation of statute.  That may sound a commonplace, but is not, when you remember that socialists, who are attacking property, do so on precisely that ground.  They say it is a fictitious thing, it is a matter of expediency, it is a matter which we can recognize or not, as we like; “no law, no property,” and they ask us to consider whether, on the whole, it is a good thing to have any property at all, or whether the state had not better own all the property.  But our Federal and State constitutions guard it expressly.