Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/222

208 estate by its use? Why, then, so much overrighteous talk of personal property owners dodging taxation?

Logical and ingenious as have been the arguments in opposition to the legal exemption of personal property from taxation; the citation and consideration of the undisputed experience of all countries, people, and ages are all that is necessary to refute and disprove them. There was a time when nearly all men believed and taught that the world was flat, and when the few who lisped to the contrary exposed themselves to a charge of religious heresy and punishment. But a comparatively short navigation experience effectually put an end to all controversy on this subject; and it is doubtless only a question of time when personal property will be exempt from governmental taxation, because no system has ever been devised, or is likely to be, which will enable a state to tax it with any approach to uniformity and equity.

—The idea that in order to tax equitably it is necessary to assess everything capable of resulting in the obtaining of revenue is not original with the American people. Its inception dates back to the dawn of civilization, and its development may be regarded as in the nature of an economic evolution. In the incipient stages of society, as already pointed out, property consisted exclusively of things tangible and visible—lands, buildings, cattle, slaves, agricultural products, household effects, and implements—and what was exacted by rulers or chiefs of their subjects was arbitrary proportions of such kinds of property or of personal service, and was not in any proper sense taxation, but tribute. For thousands of years there were no credits or material evidences of indebtedness, as there are none at the present time among barbarians or half-civilized people; for a knowledge of letters, of the art of writing, and a somewhat durable and portable material to write upon were essential prerequisites for their existence, the earliest evidence of the recognition of anything like a mortgage being the inscriptions on certain clay tablets excavated from the ruins of the ancient cities of Babylon and Assyria, which were evidently the highest results of long and slowly developing civilization. In fact, in the early stages of society there was no important form of capital other than landed property and the instrumentalities, including slaves, for its cultivation, and so far as the system for obtaining revenue for the rulers or state merited the name of taxation, it was practically a "land" tax.

As civilization advanced, slavery gradually broke down; trade or traffic between individuals or adjacent communities extended and became commerce; free labor appeared; capital developed and multiplied the forms of visible, tangible property. Then the system