806 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



inharmonious, arbitrary, and capricious tax laws and other laws will 

 be enforced by conflicting legislation of States, required by constitu- 

 tional obligations to " give full faith and credit to the public acts of 

 other States." 



The Connecticut Court of Errors, however, dissolved the injunc- 

 tion and dismissed the petition, Judge Foster alone out of a full 

 bench of five dissenting. An appeal being next taken to the United 

 States Supreme Court, the latter (in 1879) affirmed the judgment of 

 the Connecticut court, the essential points of the opinion rendered 

 by Mr. Justice Harlan being as follows : " The debt which the 

 plaintiff, a citizen of Connecticut, holds against the resident of 

 Illinois is property in his hands. The debt, then, having its situs 

 at the creditor's residence, and constituting a portion of his estate 

 there, both he and the debt are, for purposes of taxation, within the 

 jurisdiction of the State. It is, consequently, for the State to deter- 

 mine, consistently with its own fundamental law, whether such 

 property owned by one of its residents shall contribute, by way of 

 taxation, to maintain its government, and ' its discretion in that 

 regard is beyond the power of the Federal Government to supervise 

 or control, for the reason that such taxation violates no provision of 

 the Federal Constitution ' ; as manifestly it does not, as supposed 

 by counsel, interfere in any true sense with the exercise by Congress 

 of the power to regulate commerce among the several States; nor 

 does it, as is further supposed, abridge the privileges or immunities 

 of citizens of the United States, or deprive the citizen of property 

 without due process of law, or violate the constitutional guaranty 

 that the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges 

 of citizens in the several States. 



" Whether the State of Connecticut shall measure the contribu- 

 tion which persons resident within its jurisdiction shall make by 

 way of taxes in return for the protection it affords them, by the value 

 of the credits, choses in action, bonds or stocks which they may own 

 (other than such as are exempted or protected from taxation under 

 the Constitution and laws of the Unted States) is a matter which 

 concerns only the people of that State, and with which the Federal 

 Government can not rightfully interfere." 



It remains but to indicate the legitimate deductions and conse- 

 quences of this decision, and point out some of the circumstances 

 pertinent to the treatment of the case when it was before the United 

 States Court. 



In the first place, it decided that debts are property; a legitimate 

 deduction from which is that the creation of debts creates property, 

 and the extinguishment or payment of debts annihilates property; 

 a conclusion which has not received the sanction of the judiciary, or 



