808 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



gium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, or Lower Canada; for in none 

 of these countries are debts regarded in the light of property, subject 

 to taxation. 



The following facts pertinent to the history of this case are also 

 worthy of record: When the appeal from the decision of the Con- 

 necticut Court of Errors was made to the United States Supreme 

 Court, one of the most distinguished members of the bar of the State 

 of New York, and who in repeated instances had commanded the 

 respect and attention of the former court, was moved, through his 

 abstract interest in the legal and economic principles involved in the 

 case, to volunteer his services for its future argument and pres- 

 entation to this high and final tribunal. But on the day assigned for 

 its hearing, serious illness prevented his attendance on the court, 

 and the case in question went before it practically without verbal 

 argument, and mainly on the presentation of a brief. Some years 

 after the decision was rendered, the then chief justice of the court 

 (the late Morrison R. Waite) told the writer, in a familiar interview, 

 that he had no recollection of the case, and expressed much interest 

 in a presentation of the economic points involved in it. 



Another fact especially worthy of the consideration of those 

 who have been instrumental in enacting and defending statutes in 

 respect to taxation in the United States which find no justification 

 in economic principles, or any parallel in the laws or fiscal systems 

 of other countries of high civilization, is, that since the final deci- 

 sion in the Kirtland case, the State of Connecticut, where it origi- 

 nated, has derived no material advantage from it. Nay more, a 

 somewhat extensive inquiry made of its tax officials renders it doubt- 

 ful if a single extraterritorial mortgage has since been made subject 

 to taxation as property in the form of a debt in the State of Connecti- 

 cut. And the same is generally believed to be true of a vast number 

 of mortgages of real estate — especially of farming lands of the West- 

 ern States of the Federal Union — which in recent years have been 

 negotiated and sold by the large number of the so-called " loan and 

 trust companies " in the Eastern States. The fact is, the American 

 people, whose interests have called their attention to this form of 

 taxation, regard it as unequal and unjust, and so clearly in the nature 

 of double taxation on one and the same person and property, and an 

 exaction, that evasion of it is clearly warranted; the whole record of 

 experience under it constituting another demonstration of the fact 

 that under a popular form of government any law regarded as unjust 

 or unnecessary can not be efficiently executed; and to avoid the 

 necessity of evasion it has now become almost the universal practice, 

 in executing mortgages in the United States, that if the mortgage is 

 made subject to taxation the mortgagee shall pay the taxes in addi- 



