Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/626

59© HARVARD LAW REVIEW power although the owner is absent, and a tax laid upon such property may be enforced in rem,^^ but the tax cannot be made a personal obligation of the owner, upon whom the sovereign has no jurisdiction to impose an obligation. This principle has been forcibly stated by the courts. Thus, in Dewey v. Des Moines,^ Mr. Justice Peckham said : "The State may provide for the sale of the property upon which the assessment is laid, but it cannot under any guise or pretence proceed farther and impose a personal liability upon a non-resident to pay the assessment or any part of it. . . , The jurisdiction to tax exists only in regard to persons and property, or upon the business done within the State, and such jurisdiction cannot be enlarged by reason of a statute which assumes to make a non-resident personally liable to pay a tax of the nature of the one in question." The language of Judge Rumsey in New York v. McLean ^^ was equally clear and forcible f "No one will claim that any law of this State can have any extra- territorial force, or affect in any way the status of a non-resident, or impose any personal liability upon him. So that, when this tax was assessed in the year 1896 it certainly put no personal duty upon the defendant to pay it. It was only effectual then as a lien upon the prop- erty taxed. . . . Although a State has the power to levy a tax upon personal property of a non-resident situated within its boundaries and subject to its jurisdiction, and for that purpose may separate the situs of the owner from the actual situs of the property within the State, and subject it to taxation because it is within the State, yet it can only enforce the payment of that tax by virtue of its jurisdiction over the property and it has not by virtue of that jurisdiction any power to sub- ject the owner of it to a personal liability for the tax." Since a personal tax may be laid upon a resident, graduated upon his wealth, it was possible at common law to include in such a tax the value of his foreign chattels.^® This power was often rested upon the fiction that movable property is situated at the i« Paddell v. New York, 211 U. S. 446 (1908). " 173 U. S. 193, 202, 203 (1899). " 57 N. Y. App. Div. 601, 606-09, 68 N. Y. Supp. 606 (1901). " Baltimore v. Western Maryland R. R., 50 Md. 274 (1878); Bemis v. Boston, 14 Allen (Mass.) 366 (1867); Commonwealth v. Pennsylvania Coal Co., 197 Pa. 551 (1901); Norfolk & Western Ry. v. Board of Public Works, 97 Va. 23, 32 S. E. 779 <i899).