The Establishment of the Great Farm of the English Customs

Extract

The English customs duties under the early Stewarts, and the many vexed constitutional questions involved in connection with them, furnished some of the bitterest subjects of controversy at the time, both in and out of Parliament, and constitutional historians have devoted much attention to them. The questions that have been debated in this connection, however, have been mainly of one kind, and have related mainly to the constitutional powers of the Crown and the proper application of mediæval precedents under changed conditions. But there is an entirely different standpoint from which the customs can be approached, that of their administration as an essential part of the revenue-producing system, and comparatively little attention has been devoted to this aspect of the subject. It is important from a purely English point of view, but it is also specially interesting to the investigator of the English background for the early period of American colonisation, since customs duties played such an important part in fostering the growth of Virginia and of other newly established colonies.