Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/829

Rh found a place in the tax system of any country other than the United States. Second, the decision next gave a miraculous power to residence, by making it: capable of producing property out of nothing. Third, it sanctioned the right of a State to subject its citizens to double taxation in respect to one and the same property, and indorsed the justice and morality of the act. If the situs of the property—in the sense of an actuality—and the owner of a mortgage upon it, are within the territory of one and the same State, and the actuality is fully taxed by it, the separate and duplicate taxation of the mortgage would not be sanctioned except at the demand of the debtor, and which, as equivalent to his asking that the burden of his debt be augmented, he would be not likely to make. But when the actuality and the mortgage are in different States of one and the same nation, as was the situation in the Kirtland case, a different rule is held to prevail, whereby that which in one State was regarded as an incident of property, and as such properly exempt from taxation, becomes by mere transference to another State actual property, and so rightfully subject to taxation.

Fourth. If debts are property, and rightful subjects for taxation, the sphere of the application of this principle should not be restricted to debts created by a mortgage, but should embrace every form of indebtedness created by the loan of capital—as promissory notes, book credits, and policies of life insurance—which are valuable to just the extent that they represent the indebtedness of the company issuing them to the holder of the policy. But if all the forty-four States of the Federal Union or the different countries of the rest of the world were to undertake to pursue capital in the form of debts due their respective citizens for the purpose of taxation, the resulting inextricable and disastrous confusion would be almost beyond the power of imagination.

Fifth. The United States Supreme Court held that there was nothing in the form of taxation involved in this case that interfered with the power of the Federal Government to regulate interstate commerce; but if, as was further held, there was no constitutional limitation on the exercise of the power of taxation by the State of Connecticut, and that the Federal Government can not rightfully interfere with the measure of taxes that a State may impose on credits and choses in action that its citizens may own, it is difficult to see why Connecticut might not impose such taxes on all extraterritorial contracts of pecuniary value as would greatly impair or altogether prevent the commercial intercourse of her citizens with, the citizens of other States. Finally, nothing more clearly exhibits the anomalous issues involved in this case than the fact that it could not have come up before any of the courts of England, France,