Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/141

 REVIEWS 127

tutions in the United States is very full, but not quite complete. The volume is simply indispensable to students of charity, and general students of sociology will find abundant materials for consideration in the discussions, since laws and principles of common life are illustrated from cases more closely studied than would be possible under normal conditions. C. R. HENDERSON.

Essays in Taxation. By EDWIN R. A. SELIGMAN. Macmillan Co., New York and London, 1895. 434 pp., 8vo. $3.

UNDER the designation of " Essays in Taxation " Professor Seligman has made a useful survey of that portion of the product of the taxing power, as applied directly, to which he assigns the name "taxes," leav- ing to the one side fees, and introducing special assessments only for the purpose of showing that call them what we will, special assess- ments or betterment tax they are not taxes. After a brief historical essay on the development of taxation he discusses the general prop- erty tax, the single tax, the inheritance tax and taxation of corpora- tions, introducing incidentally to these subjects double taxation by the same and by competing authorities. He then classifies public reve- nues, reviews recent reforms in taxation, and closes with a critical estimate of the recent literature of the subject.

The writer is not as strong in history as in analysis and criticism, and in his opening chapter has failed to recognize the part played by purveyance in the evolution of taxation, consequently the order of growth given on pages 6 and 7 is not historical. The terminology at times is not clear; as on page 10, where the writer says that indirect taxes were introduced into England in the seventeenth century. On page 19 it appears that it was the excise which was introduced in the seventeenth century, and which seems to be used as an equivalent for indirect taxes. On page 40 we are told that there "is no evidence to prove that trading capital proper was ever taxed " at Rome, while on the following page we read that trading capital was taxed for the first time by Vespasian. It is with difficulty that we discover that ihe two remarks are intended to apply to different periods. On page 42 we read that "in England the feudal payments (scutages, carucages and foliages) became land taxes, just as the Saxon ship geld and danegeld were land taxes." The three feudal taxes mentioned were, in their origin, land taxes, and never went through a process of becoming such.