PRINCIPLES OF TAXATION. 479 



3. THE TAX IMPOSED BY SECTIONS TWENTY- SEVEN TO THIRTY- 

 SEVEN, INCLUSIVE, OF THE ACT OF 1894, SO FAR AS IT FALLS ON 

 THE INCOME OF REAL ESTATE AND OF PERSONAL PROPERTY, BE- 

 ING A DIRECT TAX WITHIN THE MEANING OF THE CONSTITUTION, 

 IS THEREFORE- UNCONSTITUTIONAL AND VOID, BECAUSE NOT AP- 

 PORTIONED ACCORDING TO REPRESENTATION. ALL THOSE SEC- 

 TIONS, CONSTITUTING ONE ENTIRE SCHEME OF TAXATION, ARE 

 NECESSARILY INVALID. 



A brief word more is desirable to complete the record of the 

 curious and instructive experience of the United States in respect 

 to the enactment and administration of direct taxation. 



Theoretically an almost ideal system, especially if made uni- 

 versal in its incidence and exclusive of all indirect taxes, its ap- 

 plication under a dual form of government, such as exists in the 

 United States, with a practical denial of resort to arbitrary action 

 in collection, such as exists in all despotic governments, and an 

 accepted rule that neither the " nation " nor the forty-five " States " 

 shall tax an instrumentality of the other, will be necessarily most 

 perplexing. These and other like circumstances, more especially 

 the inequalities and inefficiencies contingent on the act of 1861, 

 therefore, render it almost certain that direct taxation will not 

 hereafter be resorted to by the Federal Government until all 

 other means of relief for its treasury have been exhausted. With 

 the decision of the United States Supreme Court in 1896 against 

 the taxation of land incomes remaining unimpaired, as it proba- 

 bly will be unless the Federal Constitution is practically recon- 

 structed, the enactment by Congress of another income tax which 

 will not reach more than half the incomes designed to be reached, 

 will probably not be attempted. When it is also considered that 

 it will be an impossibility to separate the part of incomes of great 

 corporations which they derive from real estate, when they neces- 

 sarily use real estate in common with other property in order to 

 derive any income, the enormous expense and interminable litiga- 

 tion contingent on any attempt on the part of the Government to 

 enforce such a law will be almost beyond estimate. 



NOTE. In order to render more complete the discussion of the 

 nature and historical experience of the "poll tax/' previously 

 given in Chapter VIII, pages 165-175, Popular Science Monthly, 

 No. 2, vol. Ix, attention is here asked to a statutory and legal 

 action on the part of one of the States of the Federal Union that 

 has hitherto largely escaped public attention, and which prob- 

 ably finds no exact precedent in history. 



The antagonism between the white and colored races of the 

 Southern States, mainly contingent on the former toleration of 

 slavery, still continues to a large degree, although both races, by 



