By Irving Browne.
CURRENT TOPICS. Judge Cooley. — This department is not intended generally to embrace obituary notices, but the death of this distinguished lawyer demands a word of notice from the writer, who had so long esteemed and admired him. Few will be found to dissent from the opinion that he and Mr. Justice Miller were the most weighty authorities on constitutional law of the latter half of this century in this country. None will be found to deny to Judge Cooley the distinction of having been one of the most industrious and useful magis trates who ever adorned the American bench. As a judge and as an author he has laid the bar under deep obligation. At the time when he and Judges Christiancy and Campbell were on the Michigan bench together, that court was, as many think, the ablest State court that ever existed, and this without disparagement to the early days when Massachusetts and New York were forming the jurisprudence of the land. Judge Cooley was one of the most admirable and modest of men in his personality. He lived to a ripe age, and the only regret in connection with that fact is that his later years were grievously burdened by ill health, in which he had the tender sympathy of all his contemporaries. His name, by reason of the odor of his character, and by his printed work, will long remain a very highly honored and influential one. Mr. Justice Brewer on the Income Tax Cases. — We have derived a good deal of satisfac tion from a perusal of the address of Mr. Justice Brewer, at the Iowa University Law School, on the Income Tax Cases. The address should be read by every lawyer, for it constitutes, in our judgment, an irrefutable argument in support of the decision of the Supreme Court. The learned justice manages to inject a little humor into a dry subject by his com ments on Hylton v United States, 3 Dall. 171, distinguishing it from the cases under consideration. He says : — "The act before the court was entitled ' An Act to Lay Duties upon Carriages for the Conveyance of Persons' and the question was whether under that act Hylton, the plain tiff in error, was liable to pay eight dollars each for one hundred and twenty-five carriages which he claimed to
possess. There was no single opinion announcing the decision of the court, but each of the four justices who participated expressed separately his views. Justice Chase, whose opinion leads off, declared that he thought the law might be sustained as within the power granted the Con gress to lay duties. And while in all of the opinions there is some discussion as to what was meant by ' direct taxes,' each justice said that it was not necessary to define the term, and they agreed simply on the proposition that a duty on carriages (or chariots as they were somewhat pompously called in the statute) was not a direct tax. The statute called for no valuation of the chariots, imposed no tax based upon the value of the property. Whether the vehicle was old, worn out and comparatively worthless, or as large and magnificently gilded as the one which trans ports the band in the parade of Barnum & Bailey's circus, it was eight dollars a chariot. And if the law had been in force at the time of the departure of Elijah from earth, while Elisha was crying out ' My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof,' doubtless some eager tax collector would have been present and demanded eight dollars for the chariot. Mr. Choate, in his argument before the court, wittily referred to that tax as in harmony with the license exacted in nearly all our cities for the privilege of keeping a dog. The license fee is ordinarily two dollars a dog, no matter whether the dog be a mangy, worthless cur or a full-blooded St. Bernard. Do you suppose that one owning a half-dozen of these high-priced St. Bernards, valued as some of them are from $3,000 to $5,000, could have them taken out from the assessment of his personal property on the ground that he had paid the license fee of $2.00 a head?" Animadverting on the abuse of appropriation for internal improvements he quotes the following exquis ite satire from " Judge" : — "Representative Teeters of Iowa has introduced a bill appropriating five million dollars for the improvement of Catfish creek. This creek is unnavigable for large fish in the summer time, but with this amount of money spent upon it great results are anticipated. "Congressman Spowter is trying to induce the river and harbor committee to insert an item of three and a half million dollars in the appropriation bill for the purpose of building locks and dams on Sassafras Run, in Pike county, Indiana. With these improvements made Sassafras Run will be navigable at all seasons for row boats drawing six inches of water. "Congressman Heavyjohn of Kansas is sanguine of success in securing an appropriation of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the improvement of the Cotton495
