5 o2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the so-called " invisible and intangible " property, with unerring 

 certainty and equality. 



All taxation ultimately and necessarily falls on consumption ; and 

 the burden of every man, under any equitable system of taxation, 

 and which no effort will enable him to avoid, will be in the exact pro- 

 portion or ratio which his aggregate consumption maintains to the 

 aggregate consumption of the taxing district, State, or community of 

 which he is a member. 



It is not, however, contended that unequal taxation on competi- 

 tors of the same class, persons, or things diffuses itself whether such 

 inequality be the result of intention or of defective laws, and their 

 more defective administration. And doubtless one prime reason why 

 economists and others interested have not accepted the law of dif- 

 fusion of taxes as here given is that they see, as the practical workings 

 of the tax systems they live under, or have become practically fa- 

 miliar with, that taxes in many instances do seem to remain on the 

 person who immediately pays them ; and fail to see that such result is 

 due — as in the case of the taxation of large classes of the so-called 

 personal property — to the adoption of a system which does not per- 

 mit of equality in assessment, and therefore can not be followed by 

 anything of equality in diffusion. Such persons may not unfairly be 

 compared to physicists, who, constantly working with imperfect in- 

 struments, and constantly obtaining, in consequence, defective re- 

 sults, come at last to regard their errors as in the nature of established 

 truths.* 



* In a like experience the Duke of Argyll, in his work The Unseen Foundations of Soci- 

 ety, finds an explanation of the so-called theory of Ricardo, that the rent which a farmer 

 of agricultural land pays as the price of its hire — that is to say, the price which he pays for 

 the exclusive use of it — is no part of the cost of the crops he may raise upon it ; a conclu- 

 sion that can not be possibly true, unless it be also true that rent is paid for something that 

 is not an indispensable condition of agricultural production. "Thus rights are in their very 

 nature impalpable and invisible. They are not material things, but relations between many 

 material things and the human mind and will. The right of exclusive use over land is a 

 thing invisible and immaterial, as other rights are, and, although it is, and has been since 

 the world began, the basis of all agricultural industry, it is a basis impalpable and invisible, 

 whereas the material visible implements and tools, whose work depends upon it, are all visi- 

 ble and palpable enough, and all of which would never be were we to see them without the 

 invisible rights upon which they depend. All of the former, in their place and order, are 

 instruments of production ; all of them catch the eye, and may easily engross the attention. 

 On the other hand, if we are induced to forget those other elements, which are equally 

 essential instruments of production, merely because they are out of sight, then our decep- 

 tion may be complete, and fallacies which become glaring when memory and attention are 

 awakened may find in our half vacant minds an easy and even a cordial reception." 



Adam Smith may be fairly considered as having fully committed himself beyond all con- 

 troversy in his great work, The Wealth of Nations, to the principle that taxes, with a degree 

 of infallibility, diffuse themselves when they are levied uniformly on the same article ; and 

 he even goes so far as to admit that a tax upon labor, if it could be uniformly levied 



