Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/530

 or credits in excess of or separate from the embodied labor they are supposed to represent, we call the act swindling. Fancy a member of the legal profession appearing in court to defend such a person for selling a title, separate from an actuality, on the ground that such a title was property because he was able to sell it, and that somebody not keen was persuaded to buy it! Would the plea caveat emptor avail in such a transaction?

In other words, when the title does not inhere in the physical actuality, we give it a bad name, and the most imaginative do not call it property. A title which is really a title is never suspended or in abeyance. If a thing is embodied labor, some one, or a number of persons, has some form of title or dominion over it, and the title is inseparably allied to the thing; and therefore the sale of the title is the sale of the thing, because they are one and inseparable. Embodied labor, therefore, embodies all forms of title to the embodied labor. Credits and titles of themselves have no value, and separated from the things they represent, they can not honestly be sold at all. Who will buy them? We know the character of the men who will sell them, and their representatives will always be found in penal institutions.

If some other name be given to embodied labor than property, it will not diminish its power to satisfy human wants; and if, on the other hand, we call credits and titles property, they can not be eaten, or made of themselves in any form to satisfy wants, but they can represent things which will satisfy wants. It is interesting also to note that when attempts have been made to claim salvage for the recovery of bills of exchange, or other titles of property, from wrecks, the courts have decided that salvage in such cases is not allowable; and, therefore, have practically held that credits and titles are not property, but mere rights to property, and in the case of negotiable instruments, when destroyed by fire or otherwise, the right under the destroyed instrument still remains, and can be enforced in courts when identified.

—Enact such laws, also, in respect to taxing titles as we may, experience will prove that taxes can not be practically levied on imaginary things, or legal fictions, because it is some physical actuality, in the sense of embodied labor, that must, after all, and in the end, pay all taxes. Also, "taxes are generally demanded in money, and any tax law will be understood to require money when a different intent is not expressed" (Judge T. M. Cooley). If legislatures have the power of creating fiat property—that is, imaginary or fictitious property—it is beyond their power to make it pay taxes, for nothing less than omnipotence can make something out of nothing.