Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/830

808, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, or Lower Canada; for in none of these countries are debts regarded in the light of property, subject to taxation.

The following facts pertinent to the history of this case are also worthy of record: When the appeal from the decision of the Connecticut Court of Errors was made to the United States Supreme Court, one of the most distinguished members of the bar of the State of New York, and who in repeated instances had commanded the respect and attention of the former court, was moved, through his abstract interest in the legal and economic principles involved in the case, to volunteer his services for its future argument and presentation to this high and final tribunal. But on the day assigned for its hearing, serious illness prevented his attendance on the court, and the case in question went before it practically without verbal argument, and mainly on the presentation of a brief. Some years after the decision was rendered, the then chief justice of the court (the late Morrison R. Waite) told the writer, in a familiar interview, that he had no recollection of the case, and expressed much interest in a presentation of the economic points involved in it.

Another fact especially worthy of the consideration of those who have been instrumental in enacting and defending statutes in respect to taxation in the United States which find no justification in economic principles, or any parallel in the laws or fiscal systems of other countries of high civilization, is, that since the final decision in the Kirtland case, the State of Connecticut, where it originated, has derived no material advantage from it. Nay more, a somewhat extensive inquiry made of its tax officials renders it doubtful if a single extraterritorial mortgage has since been made subject to taxation as property in the form of a debt in the State of Connecticut. And the same is generally believed to be true of a vast number of mortgages of real estate—especially of farming lands of the Western States of the Federal Union—which in recent years have been negotiated and sold by the large number of the so-called "loan and trust companies "in the Eastern States. The fact is, the American people, whose interests have called their attention to this form of taxation, regard it as unequal and unjust, and so clearly in the nature of double taxation on one and the same person and property, and an exaction, that evasion of it is clearly warranted; the whole record of experience under it constituting another demonstration of the fact that under a popular form of government any law regarded as unjust or unnecessary can not be efficiently executed; and to avoid the necessity of evasion it has now become almost the universal practice, in executing mortgages in the United States, that if the mortgage is made subject to taxation the mortgagee shall pay the taxes in