Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/223

Rh of obtaining revenue began to have the characteristics of a general property tax; and as the coincidence of great value with small bulk in some forms of tangible, visible property favored concealment, some methods of obtaining revenue from property other than mere inspection became necessary, and were obtained by the Romans in the latter days of their empire by endowing their assessors and taxgatherers (as before shown) with the power to administer torture to unwilling taxpayers, a method that was followed and perpetuated until within a very recent period by the rulers of most Asiatic countries; and in later days, when credits came into existence and extensive use, and titles to property and evidences of indebtedness were regarded as property, although intangible and invisible, a method for discovering and assessing the same, as approximate to actual torture as a higher civilization would sanction, was everywhere adopted.

And how such methods continue to exist and their practice be regarded with favor in states and communities claiming to be in the highest degree civilized and enlightened, finds proof and illustration in the following circumstance. In 1874 the Legislature of Massachusetts created a commission of three persons to inquire into the expediency of amending the laws of that State in respect to taxation, and placed at its head the chairman of the Board of Assessors of the city of Boston, a gentleman long identified with, if not the originator of, the idea of making an arbitrary, irresponsible "dooming chamber" an essential feature of tax administration. At the outset this commission was evidently impressed with the necessity of vindicating the "infinitesimal" or "general property" tax system, then and at the present time especially favored and fully exemplified in their State. And they set about it in the following manner: with the Declaration of Independence before them, maintaining it to be in the nature of a self-evident truth that "all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights," and "that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," the commission gravely announced that "the individual person" (in Massachusetts) "has no individual rights except that to his own righteousness," thus laying a sure foundation in justification for a recurrence in Massachusetts to the torture tax system of the ancient Romans if its tax administrators should consider it expedient.

After the dissolution of the Roman Empire and the subsequent reconstruction, as it were, of government and society in Europe during the early feudal period, and when land was practically the only form of wealth, the payments exacted for the support of the governing powers—kings, barons, knights, etc.—were essentially and almost exclusively in the nature of land taxes; and the terms