Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/836

814 following judicial decisions: The Court of Errors of New York, some years ago, decided that private property could not be forcibly taken for a private road, even if compensation was made by the party benefited, because the act was the taking property arbitrarily, and not according to due process of law.

The national bank act acknowledges, and the courts of the United States have so held, that a bank has a situs and its shares a situs where the bank is located, and not where the stockholders reside. The national bank act, therefore, discards the usual State principle of taxation, that personal property follows the owner.

The principle that two States can not tax at the same time the same property, and that a State can not tax property and rights to property lying beyond her jurisdiction, has been also affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States (December, 1868), in the case of The Northern Central Railroad vs. Jackson (7 Wallace, 262). The railroad corporation in question, extending from Baltimore in Maryland to Sunbury in Pennsylvania, was the result of the consolidation of four railroad companies, one incorporated by the State of Maryland and three by the State of Pennsylvania. The latter State imposed a tax of three mills per dollar of the principal of each bond issued by said road, which tax the company, at their office in Baltimore, deducted from the coupons of the bonds of said consolidated road held by Jackson, an alien, resident in Ireland.

The court, by Mr. Justice Nelson, decided adversely to the tax, on the ground that the bonds were issued upon the credit of the line of road, a portion of which was within the jurisdiction of the State of Maryland, and that the security, bound and pledged for the payment of the bonds and of the interest on them, embraced the Maryland portion of the road equally with that portion situated in the State of Pennsylvania, respecting which condition of affairs the court used the following language:

It is apparent, if the State of Pennsylvania is at liberty to tax these bonds, that to the extent of this Maryland portion of the road she is taxing property and interests beyond her jurisdiction. Again, if Pennsylvania can tax these bonds, upon the same principle Maryland can tax them; this is too apparent to require argument. The consequence of this, if permitted, would be double taxation of the bondholder. The effect of this taxation is readily seen: a tax of three mills per dollar of the principal, at an interest of six per centum, payable semi-annually, is ten per centum per annum of the interest; a tax, therefore, by each State at this rate amounts to an annual reduction from the coupons of twenty per centum; and if this consolidation of the line of road had extended into New York or Ohio,