Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/406

390 between direct and indirect taxes that is founded on sound philosophy and large experience, and can not be refuted—namely, a direct tax has always in it an element of compulsion. The person against whom or on whose property or income a direct tax is levied has no option whether or when he shall pay. There is nothing voluntary about it. On the other hand, an indirect tax, whoever may first advance it, is paid voluntarily, and primarily by the consumer of the taxed article.

But the most important and vital issue involved in the income tax enacted 1894 (August 18th) was that it designedly provided for discriminating taxation, and this fact may be best demonstrated and brought to popular comprehension in the following manner: In a recent interview (1885) with a leading British parliamentary authority, the conversation turned on the new and unprecedented discriminating rates in the legacy and succession taxes imposed by the present British Parliament, and the opinion of the writer was asked respecting them. He returned, offhand, the answer that he could only discuss them from a British point of view, for, under the Constitution of the United States, such taxes could not be levied by the Federal Government, contemporaneously, and how promptly foreign authorities recognize the truth of this position is shown by the following extract from an editorial in the London Times on the phase of the income statute then before the United States Supreme Court: "Were we," it said, "under the United States Constitution, Sir William Harcourt's budget would have been declared unconstitutional. Populist leaders in America must envy us the freedom of dealing with other people's property, enjoyed in this motherland of liberty." This conversation led to a historical investigation, and the recognition of what seemed to be a fact little or not before noted, that the United States is the only nation that now exists or ever has existed which, through constitutional or other provisions, has, or has had, any limitations on its Government in respect to the general exercise or extent of the power of taxation. If there are any exceptions, they are to be found in the legislative enactments of the French National Assembly of 1789, and possibly in what is now known as the referendum system of Switzerland.

But a government that has no limitations on its power of taxation, that can arbitrarily take in whatever manner, to whatever extent, and at whatever time it pleases, the property of its people or subjects, whether that right exists in theory, as in England, or in actual practice, as in Germany, Austria, and Russia, is a despotism. If this assumption and reasoning may seem to any one extravagant and unwarranted, his attention is respectfully asked to the following expression of opinion on this subject by the United States Supreme