8 io POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ors (Hill vs. Crosby, 26 Howard, par. 413). It would seem that business, occasional, tran- 

 sient, or permanent, transacted in a State by a resident or nonresident, by the force of 

 State sovereignty, may be made subject to a uniform rule of taxation. 



Extraterritorial taxation can have no force in American jurisprudence. Protection and 

 taxation are correlative terms. Protection to that portion of property not taken or ab- 

 sorbed by the tax is the consideration or compensation for all legitimate taxation, and 

 extraterritorial taxation is therefore a mere arbitrary " taking of private property without 

 due process of law." When property is not protected by the law of a country or of a State 

 and beyond the process of its courts, there can be no power to tax it (this principle is 

 manifestly as applicable to business as to property — Rice vs. the United States, 4 Wheaton 

 246). In the foreign-held bond case, 15 Wallace 319, the United States Supreme Court 

 said that " property lying beyond the jurisdiction of the State is not a subject upon which 

 her taxing power can be legitimately exercised. Indeed, it would seem that no adjudication 

 should be necessary to establish so obvious a proposition. The power of taxation, however 

 vast in its character and searching in its extent, is necessarily limited to subjects within the 

 jurisdiction of the State. Tliese subjects are persons, property, and business" 



These admitted facts and the opinions cited indicate that Connecticut is endeavoring in 

 this case to enforce an extraterritorial tax on extraterritorial business, and a further con- 

 sideration of the subject might here be dismissed, but a more detailed examination may 

 show more clearly the unconstitutionality of this arbitrary exaction. 



Effect of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution 

 of the United States in Respect to the Arbitrary Appropria- 

 tion of Property by Taxation or Otherwise. — Another point 

 preliminary to reform, and in respect to which it is important that 

 there should be a clear understanding on the part of the people, is 

 that there is a broad and philosophical distinction between " taxa- 

 tion " and " arbitrary " taking. It is often assumed that a State, 

 because of its sovereignty, may, through form of law and delegated 

 authority, deal with the persons and property of its subjects as it 

 may see fit; and, repugnant as this assumption is to the principles 

 which are assumed to constitute the foundation of all free govern- 

 ment, it is not to be denied that previous to the adoption of the 

 fourteenth amendment of the Constitution of the United States 

 in 1868, it would be difficult to show that restraint existed upon the 

 complete sovereignty of the States of the Federal Union over persons 

 and property within their unquestioned jurisdiction; the right to 

 hold a certain class of their population in slavery, and the right to 

 take private property for public purposes without making any com- 

 pensation, being illustrative of the exercise of such arbitrary powers 

 in the utmost extreme. But since the decision of the United States 

 Court in the Kirtland case, the same court has for the first time given 

 a decided opinion on this subject, unmistakably as follows: " There 

 is no such thing in the theory of our Government — State or national 

 — as unlimited power in any of these branches. The executive, the 

 legislative, and the judicial departments are all of limited and de- 

 fined powers. There are limitations of power which arise out of the 

 essential nature of all free governments, implied reservations of 



