fect
socialism could do no more than take the other sixty per cent. This
whole problem of taxation, indeed, is evaded at present only by the
miserable solution of fraud; hardly any one, except the non-propertied
classes, paying what the law purports to take from them; and the
non-propertied classes only pay it because their taxation, being
indirect, is paid for them by others.

Coming to other forms of taxation, we may distinguish three: Income,
succession, and license. Income taxation in England dates, it is said,
from 1435; but (in the shape of tithes) it is far older. The power of
income taxation (except upon earnings and profits) belongs here only
to the States; just as the sole power of imposing duties on imports is
given to the Federal government. Many of the States impose an income
tax, but I observe no particular increase in that kind of taxation in
the legislation of the last twenty years. A man's income is commonly
taxed with his other property. It is a form of tax far more evaded
here than in England, probably because the English law provides a
machinery for collecting a large part of income taxation from the
persons from whom the income is derived, as, for instance, from the
tenant who pays rent to a landlord; just as with us a corporation
is made to pay the tax on its capital stock nominally due from the
individual owner. The only notable extension of income tax legislation
is in the establishment of the principle of the _graded_ income tax,
which is beginning to be adopted in a few States, as in North and
South Carolina in 1897.

This principle of graduated taxation has, however, been nearly
universal in our next and more modern variety--the succession tax. The
old English precedents are the "aids" and fines for alienation. But
beginning here about 1893, this form of taxation has now been adopted
by nearly all the States, the amount of the tax being graded both
according to the relation of the inheritors to the person from
whom the succession is derived, and according to the amount of the
inheritance itself; the rate of the tax thus varying all the way from
an absolute exemption, as to the wife or children, to a tax as high as
twenty-five per cent. (in New York) in the case of large estates going
to remote relatives. The Federal inheritance tax imposed at the time
of the Spanish war was soon repealed, and this domain of taxation,
with the income tax, is now almost universally employed by the States.
The