TEE STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY 371 



for proposing the income-tax amendment. But the decision of 1895 

 fanned the fires of social discontent. It unmasked the motives of those 

 opposed to an income tax. On the one hand, are those well able to bear 

 the burden of taxation upon whom a properly administered income tax 

 would to a considerable extent rest. On the other hand, are the bene- 

 ficiaries of protection who fear that an income tax will deprive them of 

 one pretext for the maintenance of the tariff. The glaring injustice of 

 any income tax apportioned among the several states according to popu- 

 lation, in conformity with the court's decision, made such a tax imprac- 

 ticable. One effect was to discredit the court itself. Another fact had 

 a similar effect. In its first decision, the court divided evenly on certain 

 of the points at issue. After reargument it stood five to four against 

 the act on these points. Far from conserving the social order, the in 

 come-tax decision did quite the reverse. 

 Professor Daniels says: 



The decision or, more strictly, the decisions of the Supreme Court which 

 killed the Income Tax of 1894 made a great deal of history, and unmade, or, at 

 all events remade, a good deal of law. It certainly traversed legal expectation, 

 it jostled the doctrine of stare decisis, it contravened previous decisions, and it 

 discredited a good many dicta which had already become "blessed words" among 

 authoritative text writers and accredited authorities on constitutional law. . . . 

 The deliverance of the court can be explained only by reference to what has been 

 happily termed "psychological climate." . . . The Supreme Court had re- 

 versed its own decision before, but except in the legal tender cases no modern 

 decision had been reversed which bore very directly upon the stirring political 

 issues of the day. But the court evidently had not been appealed to in vain 

 upon the issue that the tax was a stride towards socialism, and the ' ' weightier 

 matters of the law" seemed to have been forgotten under the shadowy sense of 

 dread which the dim specter of socialism invoked. The most venerable member 

 of the court gave emphatic utterance to the feeling which moved him. "The 

 present assault upon capital," said Mr. Justice Field, "is but the beginning. 

 It will be but a stepping-stone to other, larger and more sweeping, till our po- 

 litical contests will become a war of the poor against the rich, a war constantly 

 growing in intensity and bitterness. ' ' 3 



Probably the Dartmouth College case has been more often quoted 

 than any other as indicative of the jealous care with which the Supreme 

 Court safeguards property rights. But few decisions illustrate better 

 the relativity of judicial decisions to the circumstances existing at the 

 time and place. When the decision was handed down, business was still 

 conducted on a very modest scale, and the era of the corporate form of 

 business organization was yet to come. In view of the important re- 

 spects in which the doctrine of charter rights has been modified in sub- 

 sequent cases, it is probable that the decision handed down in 1819 

 would have been different if the industrial changes of the next fifty 

 years had been foreseen. Some one has aptly said that the Supreme 



3 Winthrop More Daniels, op. cit., pp. 199, 200 and 206. 



