Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/221

Rh a loss in a single year of over $130,000,000, and in which the taking of false oaths was at every step an essential feature, constitutes a third; while of individual examples, which every assessor of experience can detail, the record would be almost interminable.

During the past few years the low tone of commercial morality in the United States has been a fact generally recognized and much commented upon; but it has not, that we are aware, been made a subject of inquiry by those to whom the guardianship of public morals is particularly intrusted. How far the existing system of laws relating to taxation—national and State—are justly chargeable with the results to which reference has been made, or how much in the division of responsibility is to be set down to the account of those who violate the law, and how much to those who, forewarned of the weakness of human nature, deliberately make laws which especially lead men into temptation, are yet unsettled questions.

A point of great interest and importance in this connection, though often overlooked, is that even if all the States of the Federal Union should entirely exempt personal property within their territory and jurisdiction from taxation, it would nevertheless, owing to the dual nature of the Government of the United States, be subject to a large measure of heavy and disproportionate taxation. Thus, the expenditure of the Federal Government, which represents taxation, was in 1896, including the cost of revenue collection, in excess of $445,000,000, not one cent of which was derived from taxes on real estate. The aggregate of annual taxation by States, counties, cities, municipalities, and the District of Columbia for the same year is estimated by reputable authorities to have been about $400,000,000, of which at least one fifth was assessed or was collected from personal property. If real estate paid all the State taxes, personal property therefore would still be paying all the United States Government taxes, or a large excess of its equitable share of any or all national taxation. A claim that any personal property owner is justified in protecting himself against such extortion in any and every legal way has much, therefore, to be said in its favor. When such protection can not be effected legally, he has only to leave the State for others that are not extortionate oppressors of capital. But who can not perceive on reflection that personal property (capital) must be largely used by its owners and at fair rates at their residence; and that the home of such capital will show the benefit in increased local business, increased population, and increased value of real