Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/390

374 in graveyards); and in blanks officially furnished for such purpose there is a special space for a return of every individual's income. If no return is made, then the Board of Assessors meet in secret in an upper room of the City Hall, known as the "Dooming Chamber," and arbitrarily determine the amount of income for which each delinquent shall be assessed; and from such determination there is practically no appeal. The amount thus assessed for income to the individual is then "lumped in" with the aggregate of his other taxes; and if a dissatisfied taxpayer wishes to discover what amount has been decided upon as his income, the assessors will not afford him any information. Under such circumstances it might naturally be supposed that the administration of an income tax in the city of Boston would be an unqualified success. But what are the facts?

First, comparatively few of the taxpayers of Boston make any returns to the assessors of their income. Second, the returns that are made are not open to the inspection of the public. There is no law in Massachusetts covering this point, but one of the Boston assessors is reported as saying that if the returns were open to public inspection none would be made, as the chief objection of taxpayers to filing returns was the fear that their incomes from business or professions might be known. The statutes of Massachusetts, however, provide that the returns of each individual's property shall be made by the assessors of every city and town in the State to the secretary of the Commonwealth; but inquiry shows that the Boston assessors make no such returns. Third, although the amount annually collected from an income tax in the city of Boston is very considerable—$840,000 in 1892—it probably represents, according to the Boston Advertiser, "only about one fourth of what is due in the city from incomes." In the face of such an exhibit the question is pertinent, What measure of success do the present advocates of a Federal income tax expect will follow an attempt to expand the Boston system of its administration over an area of country extending from Florida to Alaska?

One would naturally think that the lesson of experience which the Government and the people of the United States have already had, would restrain further experimenting with this subject until the next war or the arrival of the millennium.

That a free government can not efficiently collect a tax which its people regard as unjust without a resort to despotic methods that public sentiment in turn will not tolerate is illustrated in this further tax experience of Massachusetts:

The State laws require that citizens who are shareholders in corporations organized in other States shall be taxed in Massachusetts on the market value of shares so held; and such owners are