Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/173

Rh or duties on imports or exports. By repeated decisions of the United States Supreme Court, another provision has been substantially ingrafted in the Constitution—to wit, that neither the Federal Government nor the governments of the States shall tax any of the instrumentalities or exclusive property of the other. The result is that, except for possible provisions in the Constitutions of the several States, their respective legislative assemblies may regulate, restrict, or appropriate the property of its citizens to an unlimited extent, and may delegate this sovereign power to local municipal corporations created by them. In short, in virtue of the power of levying unlimited taxes, the power of the Legislatures of the States that make up the Federal Union is as absolute as that of the Czar of Russia or the Sultan of Turkey. Not only may they take in this form all the property in the commonwealth, but also the property of its citizens in other countries. There is no Federal constitutional hindrance to their taxing, to any amount, real estate in any other State or country owned by citizens resident within their territorial jurisdiction. The constitutional provision that private property must be paid for when taken for public uses mainly refers, in the States, to the taking of land for highways and other similar acts of necessity by eminent domain.

How little the people of the United States recognize the fact that they are living under a dual form of government, with like powers to some extent, especially in respect to the exercise of taxation, finds an illustration in the following incident. The question was recently put to the writer by a gentleman who had filled with ability the office of Governor of one of the leading States of the Federal Union, how it happened that the Federal