Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/162

148 answer to the question at issue. For the command of a constant and adequate revenue being beyond dispute absolutely essential to the existence of organized government, the power to compel or enforce contributions from the people governed, or, as it is termed, "to tax," is inherent in and an incident of every sovereignty, and rests upon necessity. The question of the obtaining of such revenue obviously, therefore, is the question of first importance in the economy of a state; the one in comparison with which all others are subordinate. For without revenue (and a government never has any resources except what it has obtained from the people), regularly and uniformly obtainable, no governmental machinery for the protection of life and property, through the dispensing of justice and the providing for the common 'defense, could long be maintained; and in default thereof production would stop or be reduced to a minimum, accumulations would cease or become speedily exhausted, and civilization would inevitably give place to barbarism and the wilderness. For like reasons also, or as the old-time Latin maxim, "salus populi suprema lex," concretely expresses it, the state holds command over the lives and liberties of its citizens equally as it does over their fortunes. In fact, the sovereignty of a state consists and exemplifies itself in the power to abridge the liberty of the individual citizen and to take his property; and the character of every government is mainly determined by the intent and purpose for which these two great functions from which all its force proceeds are exercised.

—The sequence of these premises is no less important, or rather of transcendent importance; for if the power of taxation is an incident of sovereignty, as it confessedly is, then the right to exercise that power must be coextensive with that of which it is the incident; or, in other words, as the power of every complete sovereignty over the persons and property of its subjects is unlimited, the power, therefore, in every such sovereignty to compel contributions for the service of the