Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/952

916 9l6 HARVARD LAW REVIEW state tax was imposed on the property of a corporation and not oh that of its shareholders, as the state court had held. It is therefore apparent that the decisions allowing United States bonds to be taxed through levies on corporate franchises and shares of stock are open to reexamination. The decision which thwarted a state's endeavor to get two taxes out of some national bank stock is Bank of Calif ornia v. Richardson,^ decided January 27, 1919. The plaintiff national bank owned shares in another national bank known as D. O. Mills and Com- pany. It was held taxable on those shares on the authority of Bank of Redemption v. Boston ^^ which held that congressional per- mission to tax the shares of national banks to their owners extended to shares owned by other national banks. The state sought also to tax the shareholders of the plaintiff bank on the full value of their stock without any deduction for that part of the value due to the stock of the Mills National Bank owned by the plaintiff bank. The minority of the court declared that this was within the letter of the congressional permission, and brought to bear the traditional theory that the property interest of the stockholder is essentially dif- ferent from that of the corporation, and that therefore a tax on the stockholder's interest in the plaintiff bank was not a tax on the property of the plaintiff. But the majority held that the purpose of the congressional permission was to allow but a single tax on national bank shares and that this purpose was defeated if the shares in the Mills Bank, after being taxed directly to the plaintiff bank which owned them, entered into the assessment of another tax on the shares of the plaintiff bank owned by individuals. The notion of " separate individuality" was not allowed to support a result deemed unde- sirable and in substance, though not literally, without the congres- sional permission upon which state power over national bank stock is held to rest. The Chief Justice's treatment of the issue is not so sharp as might be desired, but the basis of the decision may be gathered from the following paragraphs: "It is undoubted that the statute from the purely legal point of view, with the object of protecting the federal corporate agencies which it created from state burdens and securing the continued existence of such agencies despite the changing incidents of stock ownership, treated the banking corporations and their stockholders as different. But it is also
 * Note 42, supra. « 125 U. S. 60, 8 Sup. Ct. Rep. 772 (i888).