of the Constitution, must be laid according to numbers. But this objection would invalidate the act only pro tanto in respect only to incomes arising from land. It strikes me that the true ground is that the tax is virtually a capitation tax, which is forbidden unless laid in proportionate numbers (article I, section 9.) Now, there can be but two kinds of tax in respect to the subject of taxation a tax on persons and a tax on things. A tax on things belongs to one or other of these two heads: (1) Imports, synonymous (see Worcester) with customs, and duties on imports; or (2) Excises, which (I quote from Walker's American Law,' a standard authority), ' are impositions exacted upon the manufacture, retail, or consumption of commodities.' Thus imports, customs, duties, embrace things imported from abroad, and excises are taxes on things made, sold or consumed at home. And both these taxes have for their sole subject, not persons, but things; and things that are tangible, that can be not indirectly or potentially, but directly and actually used or consumed. Now, does the income tax belong to this category? If it does not if it is not a tax on things it must be a tax on persons; in other words, virtually a capitation tax. It is true that there exist taxes which are neither on persons nor on things that are tangible, such as license taxes, or taxes imposed to authorize the pursuit of a certain trade or business. But this species of taxation is exercised under the general police powers that inhere in every State or national government, and the real object of which is not revenue, but the regulation of certain trades or businesses or to subserve some special public policy under those same police powers which are practically unlimited. An instance of this is the ten per cent tax on the circulation of State banks, the object of which, as every one knows, was not to add to the nation's revenues, but to secure to the people a safe and sound currency. Such taxes may bring in more or less income to the government, but this effect is only incidental. They would often be laid and continued even if they brought nothing into the treasury at at all; and, relating only to the exercise of police, or quasi-police, powers, they are not such taxes as are contem plated in the Constitution. My conclusion is, that the income tax, being a direct tax on per sons, and laid, not according to numbers, but according to the incomes of the taxpayers, is unconstitutional." 66 The decision rendered by the Supreme Court of Illinois against the constitutionality of a recent eight-hour law of that State is essentially a declaration in favor of the right of free contract. The law provided that no female shall be employed in any factory or workshop more than eight hours in any one day, or forty-eight hours in any one week." The court holds that women and men are on the same footing as regards contracts regulating their labor and hours of work; that the restriction made by the law is in conflict with the provision of the State Constitution that "no person shall be deprived. of life, liberty, or property without due process of law," the right to labor or employ labor and to make contracts being included in this provision, the section which forbids women to work more than eight hours a day in a manufacturing establishment, while permitting them. to work as many hours as they see fit at other occupations, is declared to be an unconstitutional discrimination. the Legislature has no power to substitute its own judgment for the judgment of an employer and employe in a matter about which the latter are competent to reach an agreement, and it will not accept the plea that the provision. quoted is a sanitary provision, and therefore justifiable as an exercise of the police authority of the State. This power the court does not think can be invoked to prevent injury to an individual in a particular calling. The object of this law was to protect women from the exactions of " sweat shops." The court decides that On Saturday, March 23d, the Hillmon jury came into court at Topeka, Kansas, and announced that they were unable to agree. This is the fourth trial of this now celebrated case and the third disagreement which has occurred in this cause. In looking up the history of the case we find that in 1882 Mrs. Hillmon began suit in the United States District Court at Leavenworth against the Connecticut Mutual, the Mutual Life of New York, and the New York Life Insurance companies for the recovery of $25,000 and interest alleged to be due on policies taken out by her husband, John W. Hillmon, through Lawrence agents, in 1878 and 1879, and made payable by the death of her husband near Medicine Lodge, in March, 1879. There was a tedious three weeks' trial before Judge Foster, which resulted in a disagreement, the jury standing ten for a verdict for the plaintiff and two against. Three years later there was another trial of the case at Leavenworth before Judge Brewer, now Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. This time the jury disagreed again, standing six and six. After another three years there was a third trial before Judge Shiras, of Iowa, at Topeka. This time the jury returned a verdict for the plaintiff for the amount sued for, which, together with interest and costs, amounted to about $53,000. The defendants appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States on a writ of error and were sustained, the case being remanded for a new trial. On Jan. 9 last began the desperate legal struggle which resulted in this disagreement. For more than ten weeks some of the ablest pendent merely on a verbal agreement with her attorneys that they would make settlement with her for the trouble to which she has been put. The attorneys for the defendants were Edward S. Isham, of the firm of Isham, Lincoln & Beale, Chicago; George W. Hubbell, general solicitor of the New York Life Insurance Company; J. W. Green and George J. Barker, of Lawrence; W. R. Sweet, of Kansas City, Kan., and Eugene F. Ware, of the Topeka firm of Gleed, Ware & Gleed. John W. Hillmon came to Kansas from Indiana with his parents in 1854, and settled near Valley Falls, Jefferson county. He was then nine years of age. When he became of age young Hillmon engaged successively in the occupations of mining, bull teaming, and cattle herding, and was an allaround frontiersman. On Oct. 3. 1878, he married Miss Sallie E. Quinn, whose home had been near Tongonoxie, Leavenworth county, but who at the time of her marriage was work ing in Lawrence. For several weeks after their marriage Hillmon and his bride lived in rooms in Lawrence, never appearing to have much lawyers in the country, an army of witnesses, this time Hillmon made application to various means or any of the comforts of life. During twelve of the most intelligent jurymen that this time Hillmon made application to various life insurance companies, including the Travelcould be found in the State, and a judge detailed from North Dakota by the Judiciary De- of New York, and the New York Life, for iners', the Connecticut Mutual, the Mutual Life partment because of his well-known fairness, surance. As a result of these applications the legal acumen, and common sense disregard of three defendant companies issued insurance to petty technicalities have been endeavoring to Hillmon to the aggregate value of $25,000, the arrive at a settlement of this question, which policies dating from December, 1878, and from has been the subject of thirteen years' litigation. March, 1879, and all naming Mrs. Hillmon as It is the largest insurance case the world has the beneficiary. The premiums on these policies ever known, by reason of the amount involved, amounted to over $600 a year. The first paythe length of time during which it has been ment was made by Levi Baldwin, a prosperous pending, the number of witnesses subpoenaed, stockman of Douglas county. Late in Decemthe amount of costs incurred, and the length of ber, 1878, after some of the policies had been each of the four jury trials. Judge Alfred D. issued, Hillmon and a man named John H. Thomas, of the North Dakota circuit, has pre- Brown started overland with a team for Wichita, sided at the trial. The counsel for the plaintiff ostensibly for the purpose of starting a cattle or were Charles F. Hutchings, of Kansas City, sheep ranch near that place. An extensive tour Kan.; Samuel A. Riggs, of Lawrence; Lysander of the country to the southwest of Wichita was B. Wheat, of Leavenworth, and A. C. Quinton, made, in spite of the very cold weather, exof Topeka. These attorneys hold liens for pressed by Hillmon in his diary as "very cold, nearly the full value of the policies on which with a bitter north wind-the coldest weather the suit was brought. Mrs. Hillmon, the plain- I ever saw." Late in January the two men tiff, has been supposed to own a considerable drove to Wichita, where Brown remained and interest in the prospective judgment, but it from which place Hillmon returned to Lawrence, came out at the trial just ended that she had where he made application for and secured an given up virtually all of her rights and was de- I additional $10,000 insurance on his life. was to attend to the proof of death and make the necessary explanations. Brown said that the first trip which he and Hillmon made southwest from Wichita during the winter of 1878-9 was made in the hope of finding the frozen body of a ranchman or cowboy. In this they were unsuccessful. Just before starting out on the second trip they encountered the young man Walters, and induced him to accompany them with the understanding that he was to be employed as a sheep herder on a ranch to which they represented to him they were going. On March 17 Hillmon shot Walters, and after changing clothes with him, started off on foot, leaving Brown to tell the proper story and assist in making proof of death. On the last day of February, 1879, he returned to Wichita, and very shortly thereafter set out with his old companion, Brown, and a third person, who, the insurance companies allege, was Frederick Adolph Walters, a young cigarmaker from Fort Madison, la. On March 17, 1879, the little party camped in a secluded spot on Crooked or Elm Creek, not far from Medicine Lodge, in Barber county. Then and there some one met his death by a gunshot wound in the head, and the sixteen years' legal disputation has been over the dead man's identity. The day of the death, John H. Brown notified the coroner at Medicine Lodge that he had accidentally shot Hillmon in taking a gun out of the wagon. The coroner went On the strength of this confession of Brown's, through the form of holding an inquest without Mrs. Hillmon was induced to sign releases for arriving at any other verdict than that the man the policies which were in force on the life of was surely dead, and the body was buried. Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Hillmon, who had her husband. The policies, however, were in the hands of her attorneys and they refused to been notified by Brown of the alleged death of give them up. her husband, made application for the life in-his confession, saying it was wrung from him Afterward Brown repudiated surance that was in force. The companies, doubting that the man who had met death was Hillmon, sent agents to Medicine Lodge, who exhumed the body and took it to Lawrence, hauling it overland to Hutchinson, on the Santa Fe. At Lawrence the body was exposed to public view for a day or two, and hundreds gazed upon it, some identifying it as the remains of Hillmon and others failing to discover any resemblance. Another coroner's inquest was held, the jury declining to find that the body was that of Hillmon. As a result of the verdict, a warrant was issued for the arrest of John H. Brown for murder, but he had left the country and was not apprehended. Several months thereafter W. J. Buchan, an attorney of Kansas City, Kan., was summoned to a town in central Missouri by John H. H. Brown, who, after retaining Buchan as his attorney, made a so-called confession as to the Hillmon matter, taking oath as to the truth of his statements. His story was to the effect that John W. Hillmon, Levi Baldwin and himself had entered into a conspiracy to defraud | the three insurance companies. The plan was to have Hillmon's life insured for $25,000, Baldwin furnishing the means, and then for Hillmon to disappear. A body was to be secured to palm off as Hillmon's, and Brown by the insurance companies by threats, and Mrs. Hillmon took her case against the companies into court. In all these years neither Hillmon nor Walters has been apprehended. The companies offered a reward of $20,000 for the arrest of Hillmon, and it has been reported at least a dozen times that he had been seen at different places in the west and southwest. Once he was said to be under arrest at Tombstone, Ariz., but before the companies could send a man to identify him he had escaped. At the trial just closed several witnesses swore positively that they had seen Hillmon since his alleged death in 1879. Only last summer it was reported that Hillmon was under arrest in New Mexico, and two Jefferson county men who had known him went down in the hope of identifying him and earning the reward, but the man was not Hillmon. Walters, whose disappearance was even more absolute than Hillmon's, inasmuch as no one has ever professed to have seen him since March 17, 1879, was a young man who had just come west a few weeks before meeting Hillmon. He was from Fort Madison, Ia., where he left his parents, several brothers and sisters, and a young woman to whom he was to have been married as soon as he had acquired a competency in the west. Until the Sunday before he set out from Wichita with Hillmon and Brown, he wrote home regularly. Since that time no word has been received from him. The chief point of dispute at each of the trials of the case has been the identity of the body brought to Lawrence. The plaintiffs have brought numerous witnesses, who swear that the body was that of John W. Hillmon, and who gave descriptions of Hillmon as they knew him which correspond with the agreed-upon description of the body. A great point was made of the fact that the body bore a fresh vaccine scar of but a few weeks' standing, it being a matter of no dispute that Hillmon had been vaccinated on order of the insurance companies at the time he took out his last policy, shortly before starting out on the last trip. The defendant set up and attempted to prove that Hillmon had a missing front tooth, while the teeth of the body were perfect; that Hillmon was but 5 feet 9 inches in height, whereas the body measured more than 5 feet 11 inches; that Hillmon had a scar on the ball of his left thumb and another on his head, whereas the body was not thus marked. Not stopping with attempting to refute the identification of the body as that of Hillmon, the defendants also sought to establish that the body was that of Walters by having it identified as such by numerous friends and relatives of Walters, and by proving that moles found on the body corresponded with moles upon the body of Walters, and that there was a marked facial and bodily resemblance between the body and the other members of the Walters family. Every point made by either side has been so strongly contested and the evidence has been so conflicting and contradictory that it has been thought that it would be little less than a marvel if twelve jurymen could be persuaded to think alike upon the question and be able to return a verdict. No one at any time, excepting those directly interested in the case, has ventured to predict or even to hazard a guess as to the outcome. Already several important decisions have been made in regard to property subject to the operation of the income tax. Acting Commissioner Wilson has recently held as follows: Money received from pensions is taxable as income. Money received on life insurance poli cies, when paid during life, is not taxable as income. Money received on life insurance and distributed to the heirs is subject to tax. Where corporations declare and distribute dividends in excess of the net earnings, the excess of such dividends over the net profits is not subject to tax. National banks may deduct the one per cent tax on their circulation. The value of real estate acquired by inheritance should not be returned as income; only the profits. All premiums paid for fire insurance policies must be allowed as a deduction. Only debts contracted in the year 1894, and found to be worthless, can be deducted from income for said year. Co-operative creameries, if doing business for profits, are liable to income tax upon their net profits. Life insurance premiums cannot be deducted as a business expense. In the case of the taxation of pensions as income, it is much like the case of the "Injun giver," and it would seem as if Uncle Sam wanted to "keep a string" on what he gave away. A Barrister" has written to the Law Times a letter which is of interest to Americans, as it contains considerable criticism of the home office, of the action of the home secretary, and of the Maybrick case. The letter, as published, is: "The home office is really on its trial in the case of Mrs. Maybrick, and the sooner the home secretary recognizes the fact the better. It cannot be denied that there are other cases in which its late decisions have failed to give satisfaction to those who were acquainted with the facts, and which throw very grave doubts on its fairness in dealing with claims for mercy based not on extenuating cir cumstances or ill health, but on the innocence of the prisoner. Thus, in the case of a man named Potter, of Bradford, the home secretary, had, I believe, all the evidence on which his accuser was afterward convicted of perjury laid before him, but declined to interfere. On the subsequent trial the jury was, of course, bound to give the benefit of the doubt to the accuser instead of her victim; yet they reversed the decision of the home secretary, who took more than a month longer before he could make up. his mind to release the prisoner. Potter's term of penal servitude for a felonious assault on Smith, running concurrently with Smith's sen cases into a court of law. THE TAXING POWER OF THE UNITED Tunder the articles of Confederation arose chiefly from the fact that the central government did not Congress, should be defrayed out of a common treas ury, which should be maintained by the several States in proportion to the value of all land within each State granted to or surveyed for any person, as such land and the buildings and improvements thereon should be estimated according to such mode as Congress should from time to time direct; and the taxes for paying that proportion were required to be laid and levied by the authority and direction of the Legislatures of the several States.1 tence for falsely swearing that Potter had assaulted him, for upward of a month, was an incident that could hardly have occurred in any HE failure of the government of the United States civilized country except England. In another case a man named John Kelsall has been kept in penal servitude for nearly a year and a half after the principal crown witness confessed that she committed perjury, and that he was wholly innocent of the crime imputed to him. His release will probably have become compulsory by the time this letter can appear; but the fact remains that these two innocent men would have probably served out their respective sentences if they had not succeeded in bringing their Now the allegation is plainly made by persons by no means ignorant either of the law or of the facts, that Mrs. Maybrick's is a similar case, and that the only reason why she has not been released before this is that she has not been able to bring her case before any legal tribunal. And I confess that when I learned that the home secretary had not thought it worth his while to interview (personally or by means of some other official) any of the witnesses whose evidence was tendered to him by Mr. Harris in April last, and had not instituted any of the inquiries suggested by their testimony (such as whether the packet of arsenic and charcoal found in the house was Mr. Blake's packet, and whether he could identify the handwriting upon it) my feeling was one of simple amazement. I could hardly believe that any tribunal could be so utterly careless about ascertaining the truth in terly careless about ascertaining the truth in matters of such vital importance to the case as mendations of Congress, and refused to levy and the tracing of the arsenic found in the house on collect the taxes asked for by that body. The nathe one hand and the explanation of the pur- tion was on the verge of bankruptcy. This being chase of the fly-papers on the other. But if the condition of affairs, it is little wonder that upon Mr. Asquith had any good reasons for his de- the organization of a more perfect government, under a national Constitution, the first power concision, he can easily set the public mind at rest ferred upon Congress by that Constitution is the on the subject by holding a public inquiry, examining witnesses, hearing arguments and pro-and excises." It was the purpose to grant this power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts nouncing his decision on judicial grounds. If the home office came successfully through this ordeal a good deal would be done to restore public confidence in it. But would it come through the ordeal successfully? My private opinion is that it would not, and that the home secretary himself has a shrewd suspicion that if its action in the Maybrick case were tried in the balances it would be found wanting. Surely, if so, it is high time to mend the department or to end it." Under a system so poor as this, the government, even during the war for independence, was often without funds to pay the public debt and meet the exigencies of the public service; and there were times when the private credit of her treasurer was more powerful than her own to secure the nation against her creditors, obtain her loans, and prevent the ignominious failure of the revolutionary cause. After the conclusion of peace, in 1783, when the presence of an armed and hostile force in their midst no longer incited the people to grant the requisitions of Congress, the States became utterly indifferent on this subject, disregarded the recom power to the general government so that she should not, in the slightest degree, be dependent upon the States for her revenues, and that her power to raise revenue should be adequate to her wants. The great object of the Constitution was to give Congress power to lay taxes adequate to the exigencies of the government, and its grant was, therefore, a general grant, without limitation as to place. It 9 2 1 Articles of Confederation, Art. VIII. Hylton v. United States, 3 Dal. 171. |