Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/712

676 HARVARD LAW REVIEW International Paper Co. v. Massachusetts, 246 U. S. 135, and Locomobile Co. V. Massachusetts, 246 U. S. 146." ^^^ Among the circumstances thus taken into consideration and previously detailed in the opinion was the fact that the company's contracts in Virginia called for a total consideration in excess of $200,000. The caution that the case is on the border line and the mild approval of the tax as not wholly arbitrary or unreasonable show clearly that a maximum limit or series of Hmits to an excise measured or roughly graded in accordance with capital stock does not save the statute from sin unless the maximum is reasonable. Curiosity may still be piqued to discover what will be the test or tests of reasonableness, but we may now be satisfied that a flat charge on the local business of a company that also conducts inter- state business is not immune from condemnation as a regulation of interstate commerce and a denial of due process of law. If this is true of an excise on the local business of a foreign corporation, it must also be true of specific taxes on acts or occupations, where we are relieved from any intrusion of the notion of an arbitrary power over the doings of a corporate entity. There remains for consideration only the question of the proper test of reasonableness. St. Louis, Southwestern R. Co. v. Arkansas ^^® declares that the basis of an excise on a foreign corporation engaged in combined local and interstate commerce may be that proportion of the total capital stock which represents the value of the property within the taxing district, though such property is used in inter- state as well as local commerce. This excise measured by the property within the state was in addition to an ordinary property tax, but it appeared that the right to do business as a corporation was not included in the assessment of that ordinary property tax. Mr. Justice Pitney's opinion is flavored with the notion that this excise and the so-called ordinary property tax together did no more than to assess the total property at its value as a going con- cern, but it is not definitely stated that the propriety of measuring an excise on local business by the total property in the state is conditioned on the mode by which that property is assessed for ordinary taxation. It seems reasonable to assume that, in the "8 246 U. S. soo, sii, 38 Sup. Ct. Rep. 360 (1918). "« 235 U. S. 350, 35 Sup. Ct. Rep. 99 (1914)-