Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/66

58 articles may be subjected to different rates, provided they are uniform as between different places and different States; as it obviously "could not have been the intent of the framers of the Constitution that the Government in raising its revenues should not be allowed to discriminate in respect to articles which it desired to tax."

In the case of the several States of the Federal Union, to which the Federal constitutional requirement in respect to uniformity of taxation does not apply, the same question—i. e., as to what constitutes uniformity—has been also a troublesome one, but different in its manifestation. The provisions relating to taxation in the Constitutions of these several States generally start with the idea, expressed or implied, that taxes must be uniform; and a strict construction of this language in a tax statute, operative in only one State, and where the Federal limitation of uniformity as respects place does not apply, might be construed as restraining the authorities of a State from imposing any different rate of taxation on the manufacture or sale of liquors and the manufacture and sale of other merchandise, or on the land and the business of the agriculturist. These difficulties in the way of construction have, however, been largely obviated by recognizing that when in the statute of a State the words "taxes must be uniform" are used, the word "uniform" does not mean, as in the Federal Constitution, uniformity as to "place," but uniformity "with regard to the subject of the tax"; an interpretation in full conformity with the principle before enunciated, that uniformity of taxation consists in the making of the burden of taxation equal upon all subjects which are in the same field or sphere of competition; or, as has been also expressed by Justice (S. F.) Miller, "different articles may be taxed at different amounts, provided the rate is uniform on the same class everywhere, with all people and at all times. Take, for instance, the case of a license: if everybody in any particular class is required to pay a certain license—if all lawyers are taxed twenty-five dollars a year, all merchants one hundred dollars, and all saloonkeepers two hundred dollars—then the license taxation is uniform, because it imposes the same burdens upon every man of the same class, who comes within a circle of well-defined limits. . . . This interpretation," he adds, "may be a little strained, but probably it has arisen from the necessity of enabling the Legislatures to levy taxes according to common sense, if not altogether with regard to strict uniformity."

The opinions expressed by the State courts of the United States when this question of uniformity of taxation has been