THIRTEENTH REPORT. 
spinning wheels and weaving looms, worth less than $50 or libraries and 
school books not to exceed $150 or ten sheep or two cows or five swine, 
fuel for six months or arms and accoutrements or any one or more of 
these ittuus might claim under the law of 1853 immunity therefore from 
taxation. The property of Indians was exempt until the law of 1SG9 
and that of alien Indians until the present time. Since the law of 1893 
mechanics and farmers have been exempt from paying taxes upon tools 
and implements not to exceed two hundred dollars in value and at all 
times since the property tax was first used for State purposes indigent 
persons have been free from paying taxes upon their personal property 
and since 1893 upon their realty also. 
The State has also made use of the taxing laws with more or less suc- 
cess for the accomplishment of many other purposes than those which 
have been strictly fiscal and in this way much property has been relieved 
from contributions to government. The social or industrial ends which the 
State has had in view have usually been striven for by the enactment of 
tax exemption laws by which the activities favored by government were 
relieved from the depressing effects of paying taxes. Mulberry trees for 
example, were relieved from taxation by an early territorial law in order 
to give a spring to the silk industry. Sheep were put upon the free list 
by a law of 1833 to encourage wool growing, salt and salt mills by a law 
of 1857 were freed from tax payments and indeed the industry became 
the recipient of a bounty. Sugar manufacturing plants and sugar cane 
and sugar beet growing came upon the exemption list in 1881, agricultu- 
ral societies the same year, and in 1S89 shares in building and loan socie- 
ties. The sum total of the property which has thus been freed from tax- 
ation by these means is doubtless small but the full proportions of the 
deductions which have been made from general property could not be 
shown without some reference to these special immunity acts. 
The devastating encroachments of exemption provisions upon the nom- 
inally taxable general property is partially balanced on the other hand 
by the additions in the law of 1846 of the ordinary business corporation 
to the list of taxpayers whose property should be listed upon the assess- 
ment roll. This provision for the development of a revenue from the 
ordinary business company seems indeed to have been an anticipatory 
measure since at the date of its enactment few, if any, corporations for 
gain except those within the bank, the mining, the railroad and river 
navigation industries — all of which were specifically taxed — had come in- 
to existence. The future was doubtless clearly foreshadowed however by 
the growing multiplicity of these latter companies as to the future prob- 
able character of business ownership and control so that this early de- 
signation of corporations for taxation was not unwarranted nor un- 
timely. The corporation tax of 1840 has been the basis for similar provi- 
sions' in each general taxing law from that time until the present. 
The State tax commission in its first report criticised severely the 
method of taxing corporations upon the assessment roll in the same way 
that human property owners were taxed as a method which was inad- 
equate and ineffective and makes a special charge of self-seeking against 
this class of tax payers. “In no instance,” says the report, “has the com- 
mission found any obstacles placed in its way by individuals. Every con- 
test against the commission and nearly every complaint has had its origin 
in some one of the great corporations whose assessment has been re- 
