496 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



itself, because it is a tax on personal enjoyment or final consumption. 

 The same is the case when a portion of a river or lake or its shore 

 is rented for fishing for the purposes of sport. A like result will also 

 follow, in a greater or less degree, from the inability or unwillingness 

 of tenants, as has been often the case in Ireland, to pay rent suf- 

 ficient to reimburse the landowner for interest on his investment of 

 capital and cost of repairs. But if one employs land as an instru- 

 mentality for acquiring gain through its uses, the taxation of land 

 must include the taxation of its uses — its contents, all that rests upon 

 it, all that is produced, sold, expended, manufactured, or transported 

 on it — and all such taxes will diffuse themselves. On the other hand, 

 if the taxation of land under such circumstances and conditions does 

 not diffuse itself, then the taking is simply a process of confiscation, 

 which if continued will ultimately rob the owner of his property, and 

 is not governed by any principle. 



It is indeed difficult to see how a theory so wholly inapplicable 

 to fact and experience as that of the nondiffusion of taxes on land — 

 which makes property in land an exception to the rule acknowledged 

 to be applicable to all other property — could originate and be 

 strenuously maintained to the extent even of stigmatizing any oppo- 

 site view " as so very superficial as scarcely to deserve a refutation." * 

 !No little of confusion and controversy on this subject has arisen from 

 the assumption that land specifically, and the rent of land, constitute 

 two distinct and legitimate subjects for taxation, when the fact is just 

 the contrary. The rent of land is in the nature of an income to its 

 owner; and it is an economic axiom that when a government taxes 

 the income of property it in reality taxes the property itself. In Eng- 

 land and on the continent of Europe land is generally taxed on its 

 yearly income or income value, and these taxes are always considered 

 as land taxes. Alexander Hamilton, in discussing the taxation of 

 incomes derived directly from property, used this language : " What, 

 in fact, is property but a fiction, without the beneficial use of it? In 

 many instances, indeed, the income is the property itself." The 

 United States Supreme Court, in its recent decision of the income 

 tax (1895), also practically indorsed this conclusion. To levy taxes 

 on the rent of land and also upon the land itself is, therefore, double 

 taxation on one and the same property, which in common with all 

 other unequal and unjust taxes can not be diffused; and for this 

 reason should be regarded as in the nature of exactions or confiscation, 

 concerning the incidence of which nothing can be safely predicated. 

 In short, this whole discussion, and the unwarranted assumption in- 

 volved in it and largely accepted, is an illustration of what may be 

 regarded as a maxim, that the greatest errors in political economy 



* Seligman. Shifting and Incidence of Taxation. 



