Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/495

Rh good common-school education, which covers a pretty wide range now, according to the general ideas of our people, and there the duty should stop. Money for this purpose should be contributed by private persons. We do our duty when we furnish a fair, common-school education to the children that are growing up among us"—i. e., in the District of Columbia—"and that is all we ought to contribute."

—In the popular discussions which have occurred in recent years in reference to the taxing of United States securities, the position has been not infrequently taken that it would have been just and expedient on the part of Congress, at the time of the creation of the present national debt, to have allowed the separate States to tax the evidences of such debt (i. e., the bonds) in the possession of their citizens, subject to a limitation that the same should not be taxed at any different rate than other "moneyed capital." A full consideration of the whole subject will, however, suggest a doubt whether Congress possesses the power to grant any such authorization, inasmuch as to have done so would have been equivalent to authorizing the States to do an act which in itself is unconstitutional—a thing which it is self-evident that Congress can not do. Thus "the power to tax," says Chief-Justice Marshall, in giving the opinion of the Supreme Court denying the right of Maryland to tax the Bank of the United States, "involves the power to destroy"; and in the case of Weston vs. The City of Charleston, the same court, by the same eminent authority, held further, as before shown, "that if the right to impose a tax exists, it is a right which in its nature acknowledges no limits." For Congress, therefore, to have authorized the States to tax "national agencies" would have been equivalent to authorizing the exercise of a right to destroy; which right, the Supreme Court has held, can not, from its nature, when once existing, be limited.

—The application of the decision by the United States Supreme Court in the celebrated Dartmouth College case, has resulted in the general acceptance of the legal principle that a charter of incorporation by a State is a contract between the State and the incorporators; and if such charter contains a clause exempting the incorporators entirely from taxation, or for a definite period, a subsequent Legislature can not repeal the clause of exemption. Within a recent period the interest involved in this question has become so great, and the power of wealthy corporations who claim the benefit of this principle is so extensive, that it is desirable to briefly call attention to views of dissenting legal authorities and dissenting State courts.