Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/312

296 for suppressing fraud. If absolute prohibition is the object, then such result should be attained through the police force of the state, and through its legislative enactments making the act, powers, or products which it is desired to suppress, misdemeanors or felonies. The manufacture and sale of spirituous liquors, in common with all other branches of business, is a legitimate subject for taxation, but there is a broad distinction—indeed, nothing in common—between taxing this business for revenue and in levying taxes with a view of preventing the business from being transacted at all, and so preventing revenue.

Again, if the above analysis of the origin, justification, and limitations of the power of taxation is correct, it would seem evident that to seek to make the occasion for the exercise of the power other than necessity, and the object anything else than the raising of money for meeting the expenditures of a government economically administered, is to strike a blow at not only good government, but also at free government. It is also a flat denial of the authoritative statement of the United States Supreme Court that "there are rights in every free government beyond the control of the state," and that the theory of our Government, State and national, admits of no place for the deposit of unlimited power. For the deliberate recognition and indorsement of the right on the part of the state to disregard these limitations in a single instance, is equivalent to a denial that there are any such, and certainly in this one department makes the Government despotic rather than free. Once recognize the principle of inequitable taxation, and no one can foresee how far it may be carried.

If it is contended, as it is, that the use of the power of taxation for purposes other than the collection of revenue finds justification in the fact that "the law-maker must look far enough beyond the general purpose to satisfy himself how any proposed levy is likely to affect the general good," a sufficient answer to such contention would seem to be that the general good is always best subserved by doing what is exactly right, and not what is expedient.

There is no question that the Federal Government of the United States, under its peculiar organization, is excluded from all responsibility for the internal order or morality of the States that make up the Union, and under such circumstances it follows that where Congress assumes that the consumption or use of certain commodities is prejudicial to the interests of the people (as it has done, as will hereafter be shown), and attempts, when providing means for the support of the Federal administration, to embody such assumptions, with a view of prohibitions or restraints, in measures of revenue, it is also enacting sumptuary