tion that it
does not appear to be so futile as one might have expected. There
is, of course, a tendency to raise the limit, involving frequent
constitutional amendment, or, in Massachusetts, for instance,
where the limitation is put on only by statutes, by later statutes
authorizing the borrowing outside of the debt limit; for it should be
said that such limitations do usually apply both to the appropriations
and to the funded indebtedness incurred. Still I have not observed
in the last twenty years any repeal of such laws or constitutional
provisions, but rather an increasing number of States adopting them,
from which it may be inferred that they work satisfactorily. Nearly
all the States purport to tax the capital value of both real and
personal property, not, as in England, rents or incomes; and they tax
"tangibles" and also "intangibles." That is to say, they undertake to
tax stocks or bonds or mortgage debts; the evidence of property, as
well as the property itself; and the debt as well as the property
securing It. Some States, such as Pennsylvania, impose a smaller, more
nominal, tax upon stocks and bonds in the hands of the owner, for
the sake of getting a larger return, but in many States, such as
Massachusetts, this legislation would be unconstitutional, as not
proportional taxation.

There is a mass of legislation every year directed to the
assessing and collecting of taxes, tending more and more to become
inquisitorial, requiring the tax payer under oath to furnish full
schedules of his property, with provision for an arbitrary assessment
if he fails to do so. One effect of this has been to drive very
wealthy men from Ohio or other Western States to a legal residence in
the East, where the laws are more lenient, or their enforcement more
lax. The problem is a most important one and I see no signs yet of any
solution in the increasing mass of legislation one finds upon this
subject every year. It is to be noted--what our socialist friends have
never seemed to observe--that just in so far as a man's earnings or
income are taken from him in the form of taxation, you are already in
a state of socialism. That is to say, to that extent is his income
taken from him and administered by the state. This is an observation
most unwelcome to the opponents of capitalism, so-called, who resent
the conclusion that if the State and Federal governments are already
taking forty per cent. of his income from him, a state of per