Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol II).djvu/503

right of congress to tax the state banks, and could not prove the right of the states to tax the bank of the United States.

§ 1041.

The court has bestowed on this subject its most deliberate consideration. The result is a conviction, that the states have no power, by taxation or otherwise, to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control, the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by congress, to carry into execution the powers vested in the general government. This is, we think, the unavoidable consequence of that supremacy, which the constitution has declared. We are unanimously of opinion, that the law passed by the legislature of Maryland, imposing a tax on the bank of the United States, is unconstitutional and void.^[1]

§ 1042. In another case the question was raised, whether a state had a constitutional authority to tax stock issued for loans to the United States; and it was held by the Supreme Court, that a state had not.^[2] The reasoning of the court was as follows.

Is the stock, issued for loans made to the government of the United States, liable to be taxed by states and corporations? Congress has power, "to borrow money on the credit of the United States." The stock it issues is the evidence of a debt created by the exercise of this power. The tax in question is a tax upon the contract, subsisting between the government and the individual. It bears directly upon that contract, while subsisting,

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1. The doctrine was again re-examined by the Supreme Court in a later case, and deliberately re-affirmed; Osborn v. Bank of the United States, 9 Wheat. R. 738, 859 to 868; 1 Kent's Comm. Lect. 12, p. 235 to 239.
2. Weston v. The City Council of Charleston, 2 Peters's R. 449.