Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/209

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—As a further help to the understanding of the subject, it is important to here call attention to the circumstance that the distinction between real and personal property is, to a very great extent, an artificial and not a natural one, and that there is not only no common or accepted rule for their definition and distinction, but, on the contrary, a great diversity of statute enactment by the different States of the Federal Union and by foreign governments on the subject. (For abundant illustrations in proof of this statement, see Popular Science Monthly, vol. li, No. 5, pages 607, 609.) "The statute laws on the subject of taxation in the United States," says Mr. Hillard, in his Law of Taxation, "is as voluminous as the constitutional provisions are few and concise." With a general similarity, the laws of the different States are very diverse; and so numerous and frequent are the changes that the author disclaims any responsibility in his book for the implied statement that "the law of any particular State, however recent, is now in force."

The attempt, therefore, to recognize in a system of laws a distinction in respect to the so-called personal property that is perfectly arbitrary, and which forty-eight sovereign States of the Federal Union may alter at pleasure, is very likely to give a general result somewhat akin to that obtained by an artist who, in painting a landscape, selected a cow as his fixed point of perspective. If the cow had remained quiet, the picture might have been satisfactory; but as the cow walked off, the details of the picture were not harmonious.

—One curious phenomenon attending the remarkable changes that have taken place within the last half century in the conditions of production and distribution of wealth, has been the more rapid increase in all countries of high civilization of that portion of their national wealth represented by the so-called personal property than in that portion represented by the value of land. Thus, in Great Britain, at the commencement of the present century, the value of land was believed to represent about forty per cent of the aggregate wealth or property of the kingdom. At the present time it probably does