Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/61

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PRINCIPLES OF TAXATION.
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erty, in order to secure and have the perfect enjoyment of the remainder. Governments are established for the protection of persons and property within the limits of the state, and taxes are levied to enable the government to afford and give such protection. They are the price and consideration of the protection afforded." (Ingersol, J., Circuit Court of the United States, Duer vs. Small.)

"There is nothing poetic about tax laws. When they find property, they claim a contribution for its protection." (Lowrie, Chief Justice, Tinley vs. The City, etc., 33 Penn., 381.)

Montesquieu, writing with the monarchical institutions of France mainly or solely in view, discusses this subject in his Spirit of Laws (book xxxi, chap, i), as follows: "The public revenues are a portion that each subject gives of his property, in order to secure or enjoy the remainder."

"The right to tax an individual results from the general protection afforded to himself and his property."—Vattel, Law of Nations, book i, chap. xx.

"Property and law (i. e., government or the state) are born together and die together. Before laws were made, there was no property; take away laws, and property ceases."—Bentham, Theory of Legislation.

The principle here involved is also clearly and succinctly further expressed in the following citations:

"Taxation" is, in any view, taking private property for public use, and it can not be so taken without an equivalent, both as to the Government or the citizens. It is not competent to convert private property to public use by way of taxation, and without compensation, any more than by any other mode.

Taxation (if anything in the nature of principle is assumed as its basis) therefore implies that the government imposing it will return an equivalent. But to return an equivalent in the form that was taken, namely, money, would be stultification. The only equivalent that a government can return, and the only one, in truth, that justifies taxation, is in the nature of a guarantee that the person, property, or business on which the tax is imposed shall have all the rights which the civilization of the state represents, or, in other words, "protection."—Redfield.

"If it were practicable to do so," says Justice Cooley, "the taxes levied by any government ought to be apportioned among the people according to the benefit which each receives from the protection the government affords him. This is upon the assumption, never wholly true in point of fact, but sufficiently near the truth for the practical operations of government, that the benefit received from the government is in proportion to the property held or the revenues enjoyed under its protection."—Cooley, On Taxation, pp. 14-17.

Notwithstanding this preponderance of opinion, argument, and legal decisions in favor of the correlation of taxation and