Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/23

Rh objects under the general head of personal property, and the exemption of the same classes of property from any corresponding assessment in the British provinces of North America, and in all foreign countries with which the United States enter into extensive commercial intercourse and competition. Boards of trade and commercial conventions may pass "deploring" resolutions concerning the decay of American commerce, and committees of Congress may continue to investigate the same subject, but so long as ships, engaged in the carrying trade on the free ocean, and owned in Canada, England, France, Germany, and Holland, are not directly taxed, and ships engaged in competition in the same business, and owned in Portland, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans, and San Francisco, are taxed, and taxed heavily, commerce will incline to move in the paths which are made easy and profitable to it. The difference in cost of a single penny per bushel in laying down grain at Liverpool may alone be determinative of the question whether millions of bushels shall be supplied by the wheat fields of the United States or those of Russia, India, or Hungary.

"As a rule, the States of the Federal Union tax shipping as other property is taxed, regardless of the fact that the other leading maritime nations usually impose no taxes on shipping as property, but tax only the actual earning of shipping; assuming doubtless, and correctly, that from the very nature of its use shipping can not fairly share in the benefits which accrue from state and municipal taxation for public purposes. In short, when a vessel is fulfilling the function for which it is built, it is navigating the ocean, remote, except during brief stay in port, from the fields and purposes to which state and local taxes are applied."

Only one State—Delaware—exempts shipping from all taxation; New York and Alabama exempt so much of their shipping as is engaged in foreign trade; Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut tax the earnings only of their shipping in foreign trade; and, under decision of the United States Supreme Court, Pennsylvania imposes no tax on its shipping in interstate or foreign trade.

All the other States tax all classes of vessels as personal property, making no distinction between those engaged in foreign and domestic trade.

The comparative burden of taxation on shipping in the United States and the maritime states of Europe finds practical illustration in the following examples: The city of Portland, Maine, levied more taxes in the year 1893 on its shipping (63,206 tons, valued at $909,000) than the Cunard Company paid to Great Britain in the same year on a valuation of their ships of nearly $9,000,000. The taxation of shipping at Charleston, S. C, is five times heavier than that