PRINCIPLES OF TAXATION. 509 



the j are not so until dominated over and subjugated by man; and 

 then only do they acquire value and become negotiable and subject 

 to proprietorship. Gravity and electricity, as free forces, are in- 

 capable of sale and taxation; nor can they, in any rational view, be 

 considered as property. According to recent decisions of the courts 

 of the United States, electricity is not a manufactured product, 

 and electric-light plants do not manufacture it, but only distribute it. 



What are Titles to Property? — But while political economy 

 recognizes nothing as property except physical actualities, the law, 

 for the sake of convenience, has so long treated titles as conveying 

 the same ideas as property, that the profession and the public have 

 very generally come to regard the two as equivalent or identical. 

 Consideration is, therefore, next asked to this point. 



Property being embodied and accumulated labor, it becomes en- 

 dowed, in all places where the rights of labor are recognized, with the 

 attributes and incidents of titles or evidence of just ownership or pos- 

 session — inchoate, legal, or equitable — which inhere in the property, 

 follow it, and form a component part of it wherever found. The 

 fact that the ownership, interest, or title of a non-resident, as, for 

 example, a bond and mortgage title to his debtor's property in an- 

 other state or country, can be extinguished in the real and personal 

 property of the debtor, by attachment or other process of law in the 

 state where the debtor resides, and where his visible, tangible prop- 

 erty has a situs, also leads up to and establishes as a principle of law 

 that titles or incumbrances are connected with the owner, but inhere 

 in the property, where the property is actually situated, as inci- 

 dents, form a part and are inseparable from it, and include the 

 equitable title or right of the creditor in the debtor's unsold and unin- 

 cumbered property, but are not themselves property. Some econo- 

 mists befog themselves on this subject, as before shown, by first de- 

 fining property as anything that can be bought and sold, and then, 

 since a title — as, for example, a deed — can be bought and sold, ac- 

 cept the inference that a title is necessarily property. But let us 

 analyze this definition and assumption. The creditor can, without 

 doubt, sell and deliver a deed to a farm, but what is sold in such 

 instances is the farm, including a right — namely, a right to have 

 dominion over it. But it may be rejoined that a right of dominion 

 is property. Let us, therefore, carry the analysis a little further. 

 If a farm in California is property in the State where it is and where 

 it is taxed, any right or title to the same farm, held in New York or 

 England, be it in the nature of a deed, a mortgage, a partnership 

 interest, or any other form of title, can not be the property;, for the 

 same thing certainly can not be property in two separate States and 

 jurisdictions, and in two distinct forms and manifestations, at the 



