Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/375

Rh the masters. The taille, furthermore, as a badge of servitude, was supposed to dishonor whoever was subject to it, and degrade him, not only below the rank of a gentleman, but that of a burgher, or inhabitant of a borough or town; and "no gentleman, or even any burgher," says Adam Smith, "who has stock, will submit to this degradation." Now, the idea embodied in the word servitude is an obligation to render service, irrespective of or without compensation; and the idea upon which the taxation of personal property in this country has been based is, that the property owes a servitude to the State where the owner resides, irrespective of its actual location, in virtue of the obligation which its owner, as a citizen, may owe to the State by reason of the protection which the State gives him in respect to his person.

Again, in old times, the division of property into real and personal was wholly unknown; and under the common law all property was classed as lands, tenements, hereditaments, and goods and chattels. "In the course of time, however, leases of land for a term of years were classed as chattels, and were distinguished as chattels real; while other chattels, which did not savor of lands, were called chattels personal, ‘because,’ says Lord Coke, ‘for the most part they belong to the person of a man, or else for that, they are to be recovered by personal actions.’ And Blackstone tells us that ‘chattels personal are property, and, strictly speaking, things movable, which may be annexed to, or attendant on, the person of the owner, and carried about with him from one part of the world to another’; and as instances he mentions money, jewelry, garments. Personal property, in fact, consisted almost entirely of such things as could be, and actually were, carried about with the person of the owner, or could be easily secreted. And Blackstone also tells us that the amount of the personal estate of our ancestors was so trifling that they entertained a very low and contemptuous opinion of it; and that our ‘ancient law books do not, therefore, often condescend to regulate this species of property.’ Nothing of an incorporeal nature, as credits, bonds, and mortgages, certificates of stock, was anciently comprehended within the class of personal chattels, and in fact there were few or no such instrumentalities for representing or facilitating the exchanges of property. It was otherwise as to lands or real property, as to which ‘incorporeal hereditaments’ occupied a conspicuous place from the earliest times. Such was personal property in the early history of our laws. It was of comparatively small importance, and its laws were few and simple; while real property, being of a fixed and permanent nature, was regarded as immeasurably more valuable, and was governed by laws of its own, of the most intricate and abstruse character. And because of