Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/371

Rh example, if a resident of Massachusetts owns a cow which is bodily in another State, that cow is properly taxed in the State where the animal is; but Massachusetts, in virtue of the residence of the owner within her territory, imposes upon him a second tax for the same cow. Again, owners of shares in corporations chartered and located in Massachusetts are taxed through the corporation, and their shares are free from any further taxation. But if the same persons are shareholders in corporations created and established by other States, and the real and personal property of which are fully taxed where situated, they are subject to a second tax in Massachusetts on the assumed local value of the interest of their citizens in such extraterritorial corporations.

Under this system, moreover, the same property may be, and often actually is, subjected to not merely double but triple taxation, which sometimes practically amounts to confiscation. Thus personal property belonging to a citizen of Massachusetts, but located in Chicago, would be properly taxable there, because within the territory and under the protection of the taxing power. It would, however, be taxable to the owner in Massachusetts because of his personal residence in that State; and the owner would also be liable to taxation in Massachusetts by reason of his income from the same property. The following case of actual and comparatively recent experience constitutes both proof and illustration of the accuracy of this statement: A lady of a Western State, for the sake of availing herself of certain educational advantages, removed to a town in Massachusetts near Boston, and benefited the town by building a fine residence therein. Her property, which was held by a trustee in Indiana, was taxed to him by reason of his legal holding in that State. The property itself, mainly in another State, was taxed there, and properly, by reason of its location; but at the end of her first year's residence the lady was horrified to learn that a third tax on her income was demanded of her by the tax laws of Massachusetts. "And this," the person communicating these facts adds, "will, if enforced, be a decree of my personal banishment from the State as effectual as that which the State formerly launched against Roger Williams and the Quakers." Can any one doubt that human nature, as ordinarily constituted, will protest against, and successfully evade such laws? Would it not be well in discussing this subject to mention also that it was a question of taxation that gave liberty to the American colonies, and that the principle that the people of Boston and their ministers once mainly relied upon to justify their destruction of imported tea, which they regarded as unjustly taxed by even a small amount, was "that resistance to tyranny was obedience to God"?

The claim or argument, however, which the advocates of such