APPLETONS' 



POPULAR SCIEKCE 



MOKTHLY. 



SEPTEMBER, 1896. 



PRINCIPLES OF TAXATION. 



By DAVID A. WELLS, LL.D., D.C.L., 



CORRESPONDANT DE l'iNSTITUT DE FRAlfCE, ETC. 



III. — THE DEFINITION, OBJECT, AND SPHERE OF TAXATION. 



IT would seem to be in the nature of an economic or common- 

 sense axiom, that a large and varied experience in respect to 

 the management of any one of the great departments of the 

 world's business, would result in the gradual evolutioA and final 

 definite establishment of certain rules or principles, which would 

 be almost universally recognized and accepted as a basis for 

 practical application and procedure. But in respect to the mat- 

 ter of taxation — which is a fundamental necessity for the main- 

 tenance not only of all government, but of civilization — no such 

 result has been achieved. In no department of economic science 

 is there, moreover, so much obscurity and conflicting opinion. 

 Most economists teach that there is " no science of taxation as 

 there is a science of exchanges " ; and " that there are no great 

 natural laws running through and controlling taxation and its 

 effects." And while the student will find examples in the his- 

 tory of states or governments of the practical application of al- 

 most every form of appropriation of private property under the 

 name of taxation which human ingenuity, prompted by neces- 

 sity, selfishness, or greed, could devise,* and a sufficient record 



* " In Austria everything, it is said, is taxed except the air, and even that has to be paid 

 for in places famous for their salubrity. Dogs, cycles, newspapers, advertisements, and 

 innumerable other articles — pleasures and necessaries — are included in the money-produc- 

 ing list; nothing, indeed, seemed excluded until a very short time ago, when a provincial 

 financier forwarded an exhaustive report to the finance ministry on a neglected source of 

 VOL. XLIX. — 46 



