oks. It also includes the amount of debts due to a person in excess
of the amount that he owes; also the income from his employment,
whether in the shape of profits from business or a fixed salary.

Some personal property is exempted from taxation; as, for example,
household furniture to the amount of $1,000 in value, and income
from employment to the extent of $2,000. The obvious intent of this
exemption is to prevent taxation from bearing too hard upon persons
of small means; and for a similar reason the tools of farmers and
mechanics are exempted.[2]

[Footnote 2: United States bonds are also especially exempted from
taxation.]

[Sidenote: When and where taxes are assessed.]
The date at which property is annually reckoned for assessment is in
Massachusetts the first day of May. The poll-tax is assessed upon each
person in the town or city where he has his legal habitation on that
day; and as a general rule the taxes upon his personal property are
assessed to him in the same place. But taxes upon lands or buildings
are assessed in the city or town where they are situated, and to the
person, wherever he lives, who is the owner of them on the first day
of May. Thus a man who lives in the Berkshire mountains, say for
example in the town of Lanesborough, will pay his poll-tax to that
town. For his personal property, whether it he bonds of a railroad in
Colorado, or shares in a bank in New York, or costly pictures in his
house at Lanesborough, he will likewise pay taxes to Lanesborough. So
for the house in which he lives, and the land upon which it stands, he
pays taxes to that same town. But if he owns at the same time a house
in Boston, he pays taxes for it to Boston, and if he owns a block of
shops in Chicago he pays taxes for the same to Chicago. It is very apt
to be the case that the rate of taxation is higher in large cities
than in villages; and accordingly it often happens that wealthy
inhabitants of cities, who own houses in some country town, move into
them before the first of May, and otherwise comport themselves as
legal residents of the country town, in order that their personal
property may be assessed there rather than in the city.

[Sidenote: Tax lists.]
About the first of May the assessors call upon the inhabitants of
their town to render a true statement as to their property. The most
approved form is for the assessors to send by mail to each taxable
inhabitant a printed list of questions, with bla