on the holders for the simple reason that they are residents; although the protection afforded to the latter is in no degree different from or greater than that afforded to their more fortunate and rival foreign competitors, who reside where such taxes are not imposed; all of which is equivalent to saying officially that whenever an American loan, particularly desirable for trust investments, is created, it shall be sacredly reserved for foreigners, or that bad portion of our own citizens who have no scruples about cheating the assessors. Local subscriptions to local indebtedness, with the increase of interest in the locality which would necessarily follow, are therefore discouraged, while to the American citizen residence is made an offence and coupled with a penalty.

As a further help to reasoning on this subject, it is also important to call attention here to the circumstance, that the distinction between real and personal property is to a very great extent, an artificial and not a natural distinction. Thus, for example, shares in the national debt of France (as well as stock in the Bank of France),-instrumentalities which in the United States would be regarded as personal property in its most typical form, may by French law be regarded as real estate, and as such administered upon. Again, before emancipation in the United States, slaves (which by the Federal Constitution were recognized as persons) were in some of the States declared by law to be real estate; and to-day in Wisconsin, the one species of property which is especially typical of mobility, and is of no value apart from capability of motion, namely, the rolling stock of railroads, is also by law made real estate. Equally nice is the distinction in the case of machinery. Unattached or movable, it is personal property; screwed or fastened permanently to the floor or wall, it becomes real estate. The attempt, therefore, to recognize in a system of laws a distinction which is purely arbitrary, and which the thirty-eight sovereign States of the Union may alter at pleasure,* is very likely to give a

With regard to the statute law on the subject of taxation, "it is," says Mr. Hilliard, in the preface to his recent work, "Law of Taxation," as voluminous as the constitutional provisions are few and concise. With a general similarity, the laws of the different States are very diverse; and so numerous and frequent are the statutory changes, that the author disclaims any responsibility for the implied statement, that the law of any particular State, however recent, is now in force."

general result somewhat akin to that obtained by the artist, who in painting a landscape selected a cow as his fixed point of perspective. If the cow had remained quiet, the picture might have been satisfactory, but as it was, the details were not harmonious.

Consideration is next asked to this point; To tax the instrumentalities or objects of commerce in one locality, and to exempt the same from all direct taxation in another, will clearly not permit the former to enter a common market on an equal basis for competition with the latter. And yet this unjust discrimination is exactly what does result from the attempt of the majority of the States in the Federal Union to tax all such instrumentalities or objects under the general head of personal property, and the exemption of the same classes of property from any corresponding assessment in the State of Pennsylvania, in the British Provinces of North America, and in all foreign countries with which the United States enter into extensive commercial intercourse and competition. Boards of trade and commercial conventions may pass "deploring" resolutions concerning the decay of American commerce, and committees of Congress may continue to investigate the same subject, but so long as ships engaged in the carrying trade on the free ocean, and owned in Montreal, Quebec, St. John's, England, France, Germany, and Holland, are not directly taxed, and ships engaged in competition in the same business and owned in Portland, Boston, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, and San Francisco, are taxed-and that heavily-commerce will incline to walk in the paths which are made easy and profitable to it. "The difference in the cost of a single penny in laying down grain at Liverpool,” says the President of the New York Produce Exchange, "may determine the question whether millions of bushels shall be supplied by this country, or shall be drawn from the ample fields of Hungary or Southern Russia." *

And finally, in regard to so much of the so-called personal property as is visible and tangible, and not included under any of the heads above mentioned; such as articles of personal adornment, clothing, furniture, works of art, musical instru

* Letter of Franklin Edson, President of the New York Produce Exchange, on the Reduction of Canal Tolls, April 17, 1875.

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ments, books, &c., shall we assume that we have here a class of articles on which it is desirable to levy taxes? Of course the popular answer will be most decidedly in the affirmative; for are not all these objects, it may be asked, the very ones best fitted to sustain taxation, and are they not in great part also luxuries rather than necessities? But how, it may be rejoined, are you going to tax them? for it is reasonable to suppose that if they are to be taxed, it is to be by a system that works equitably, and not by a system which by taxing A, and letting B, C, and D escape, brings the law into contempt, and by making the sense of the commission of a wrong on the part of the State the excuse for the commission of another wrong on the part of the individual, gradually undermines the morality of a community that does not wish to be dishonest. Probably the advocate of the infinitesimal system will continue to answer, "Let a law be made which will compel every person possessed of such description of property to make and hand in to the assessors a schedule, and certify to its correctness in respect to items and value by oath." But such substantially is already the law in most of the States, and its observance and execution amounts to nothing. Thus in Ohio the law subjects to taxation all visible property above fifty dollars in value, without any offset of debts; and yet the official reports of the auditor of the State show that the total number of annual assessments in Ohio do not amount to one tenth of the number of the adult population; or, what is the same thing, that only one person in ten of the adult population of this great and rich State of Ohio has any property whatever-real or personal - in excess of fifty dollars, which the eye of the law can discover; although investigation will show that it is impossible for a person to dress respectably or live decently, outside of a poor-house, who has not always at least double this amount of property in his possession. Every intelligent assessor in Ohio, when questioned in respect to the law, will answer, that it cannot be executed with even an approximation to exactness, and that a serious attempt to execute it would cause a political revolution; and yet such is the strength of popular prejudice, that any attempt to repeal this law would probably be unsuc

cessful. Some years ago a commission reported to the legis lature of Illinois a new scheme of taxation, in which among other things they proposed that every woman of “full age and sound mind," either directly or by her representative,should annually return to the assessors a statement of the value of all the jewelry, household furniture, and "all other property" in her possession; but their recommendations never received any higher consideration from the public than that of being denounced and laughed at. And most naturally; for what woman would tell her age, or the amount and value of her jewelry and finery, and more especially to a stranger, invested with a brief official authority as an assessor, and serving the State at the rate of two dollars per day? In short, no people-men no more than women can or will endure the vexing, impertinent, personal inquisition necessary to carry out a system of taxation based on the principle that in order to tax equitably it is necessary to assess everything; and yet unless such a system is carried out in all its details, what becomes of the equality claimed for it?

So much, then, for the almost insuperable difficulties having their origin in the nature of things growing out of the correlations of modern civilization, which always must be attendant on the attempt of any sovereignty to tax everything over which it has dominion or jurisdiction. Let us next consider how the situation in the United States in respect to local taxation, already thus made difficult by reason of natural causes, has been further hedged round as it were with embarrassments by the action of the Federal Courts.

In the first place, we have repeated decisions of the U. S. Supreme Court (McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheaton, 451; Weston v. City of Charleston, 2 Peters, 449), that all agencies or instrumentalities of the Federal government of every name and nature, are exempt from State taxation; and a law of Congress (June 30, 1864), which specially makes applicable what the Supreme Court had before declared to be constitutional law, to a certain class of Federal instrumentalities, namely, all representatives of value, of whatever name or denomination issued under act of Congress, bonds, coupons, national currency, U. S. notes, treasury notes, fractional cur

rency, certificates of indebtedness, etc., etc. Here then, making allowance on the one hand for so much of the national debt as has passed into the possession of foreigners, and on the other for the circumstance that what of it remains in the possession of our own citizens is undoubtedly made the agency whereby at least an equal amount of other property - surplus of savings-banks, and assets of fire and life insurance companies, etc., is successfully enabled to evade primary taxation, we have probably one sixth of the personal property of the country effectually placed beyond the reach of State assessment. There still lingers a feeling among the masses, that if Congress would so enact, this exemption of United States instrumentalities from taxation need not be; but if any person will carefully consider the words of Chief Justice Marshall in passing upon this question, namely, "That the power to tax involves the power to destroy," and that if the right exists to tax at all "it is a right which in its nature acknowledges no limits," he will probably come to the conclusion that Congress could not delegate to the States this power of impairing Federal sovereignty if it would, and should not if it could.*

Second. We have a denial to the States of the power to tax by direct assessment, license, or stamps, imported goods in their original packages. It took two decisions of the U. S. Supreme Court to restrain the Massachusetts tax officials from assuming and exercising this power. The first, made many years ago, in the case of Brown v. Maryland, was regarded as

"In the celebrated case of McCulloch v. Maryland (4 Wheaton), when the question involved was the right of the State to impose taxes upon the operations within its limits of the Bank of the United States, created by authority of Congress, Chief Justice Marshall used the following language: "If we apply the principle for which the State of Maryland contends to the Constitution generally, we shall find it capable of changing totally the character of that instrument. We shall find it capable of arresting all the measures of the government, and of prostrating it at the foot of the States. The American people have declared their Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof, to be supreme; but this principle would transfer the supremacy, in fact, to the States. If the States may tax one instrument employed by the government in the execution of its powers, they may tax any and every other instrument. They may tax the mail; they may tax patent rights; they may tax the papers of the custom-house; they may tax judicial process; they may tax all the means employed by the government, to an excess which would defeat all the ends of government. This was not intended by the American people. They did not design to make their government dependent on the States."