Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/374

358 taxing property beyond their sovereignty or territorial jurisdiction, by reason of the possession of its owner, do not follow to a logical conclusion the principle they have adopted; for they do not hold that real estate, as well as personal property, follows the domicile of its owner for taxation But for this distinction no good reasons can be given, although pretexts, claiming to be reasons, may. One claim, however, is obviously as good as another. A robber who should draw romantic distinctions between watches and purses would fail in business. If we are to be robbers in practice, let us, at least, secure some grace by honesty in our professions, and admit that what we thus take is not a tax received as the just recompense of a benefit conferred, but a compulsory levy, having its cause in our greed and its justification in our power; and as these reasons are as good for a large levy as a small one, and the whole of a man's estate is greater than its part, why not take the whole? Still further, if it is right to tax a man in Massachusetts, who has come for a lengthened stay from another State or a foreign country, for the property he has left behind, why not the man who has come for a week? If we are to do business upon the principle that "might makes right," would it not be a brilliant stroke to station ourselves at all the avenues of ingress to a State, and cry "Stand and deliver!" to the passengers? From the above citations and arguments, the conclusion, would seem to be inevitable that when a State assesses property situated beyond its territory and jurisdiction, and which its laws and processes are not competent or able to either reach or protect, or assesses one of its own citizens in respect to such property, the act has no claim to be regarded as taxation, but is simply arbitrary taking, in no respect different in principle from confiscation.

It will also be interesting here to recall some of the antecedents of this fiction of law, that personal property, irrespective of its situs, follows the owner for the purpose of taxation. Its prototype was the ancient taille, or tax of servitude, imposed on persons originally bondmen, or on all persons who held in farm, or lease, or resided on lands of the suzerain, and from which proprietors or suzerains of the land were exempt. And as no vassal could at will divest himself of servitude or allegiance to his lord or suzerain, so the obligation to pay taxes always remained upon him as a personal servitude, whatever might be the location of his property. In other words, the condition of the masses all over Europe during the middle ages was not unlike the condition of the slaves in the United States previous to emancipation. They (the slaves) had property in their possession, and spoke of themselves as owners of property, but in reality their property followed the condition of the servitude of their persons, and both persons and property belonged equally to