Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/16

6 as such placed in the worst possible light, he certainly ought not to be deprived of the privileges of a criminal, which are a right to a public investigation according to the rules of evidence adopted by free and enlightened communities, a right to be heard before condemnation, and the right to be presumed innocent of having property subject to taxation until the fact is ascertained otherwise by legal proof. But under the existing tax laws of most of the United States there are not accorded to the taxpayer the privileges of a criminal; for no tax can be assessed on a large proportion of the personal property of the State according to any rules of legal evidence that any common law court would adopt. No assessor, under the laws of New York, for example, in assessing personal property, can act judicially. The law gives him no power to obtain legal testimony of a character that is admissible in court; he must act the part of an arbitrary despot against an inculpated taxpayer, or not act at all, and his conclusions for acting must be reached at best by the testimony of those who have no means of knowing anything, in a legal sense, about the subject-matter under investigation. It seems clear, therefore, that any attempt to tax without legal evidence is an act of usurpation or despotism, wholly antagonistic to the principles of a free government, and that it is a mockery to characterize such acts as, in any sense, judicial proceedings. Nor does the right to reduce or regulate the assessment by the oath of the taxpayer relieve the law, in any degree, of its unequal and despotic character; for every individual holding public office knows that oaths, as a guarantee of truth, in respect to official statements, have ceased to be of any value. The assessments made according to the oaths of parties, furthermore, are not made according to legal evidence, upon examination and proofs; but according to the will and secret caprice of each taxpayer, instigated by his selfishness and the natural depravity of human nature. Each taxpayer, under the present rule, becomes, therefore, the interpreter not only of the law but of the fact, and makes a secret interpretation of both, and we have as many interpreters of the law as there are numbers of taxpayers; and also an indefinite multiplicity of assessors; for each person who unfairly reduces his own assessment arbitrarily assesses thereby some other of the community for the difference. Could or would any people apply the same rules for the collection of debts? Is there any one who has so much confidence in human nature that he will propose a law that a person who is sued shall be discharged from all claims of indebtedness if he will make oath, interpreting both the law and the fact himself, that he owes the claimant nothing? Is it believed that under tariff laws the government could get sufficient revenue to pay for its collection if the importer was