Amending the United States Constitution is so difficult and cumbrous a proceeding, that it had not previously been accomplished for over a century, except by the throes of the terrible Civil War.  The original Constitution had twelve amendments added to it before it was fully established in running order in 1804.  The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments were added after 1865 to prohibit slavery.  They were forced upon the unwilling Southern States.  From 1804 to 1913 no amendment was put through by the regular process.  Yet in that time efforts to amend were made on over one hundred and forty occasions.  Men had grown discouraged at last; they said that amendment was impossible.  The cumbrous system which has thus so long blocked all change was that Congress must by a two-thirds vote in each House agree to submit an amendment to the States.  These must then pass upon the new law, each in its own legislature.  If three-fourths of the legislatures approved, the amendment was to be accepted.  Few of the proposed changes ever won a two-thirds vote in both Congressional Houses; and of those few not one had ever appealed to the necessary overwhelming majority of State legislatures.  The Senatorial amendment passed Congress several years ago, and had long been knocking rather hopelessly at legislative doors.  Then the Income Tax amendment appeared.  Congress passed it almost hurriedly in a spasm of progressiveness in 1909.  Then came the great sweep of progressive policies to victory in the elections of 1912; and legislatures everywhere awoke to the universal insistence on the Income Tax.  All the States but six approved the amendment; and one of the last acts of President Taft during his administration was to proclaim its adoption.  The popular amendment swept along in its train the Senatorial change; and the latter, though still opposed by most of the old South, was ratified by all the rest of the States except Rhode Island and Utah.  So it also became law.

Nothing illustrates better the “tyranny of the dead hand” in the United States than the history of the income tax.  The Constitution laid it down that no head tax or other direct tax should be imposed except by apportioning it among the several States on the basis of their population.  No more effective barrier to any system of direct taxation could possibly have been devised.  It would seem clear that the main intention of this Constitutional provision was not merely to protect the people of the smaller States, but to force the United States Government to depend for its revenue upon indirect taxes.  Such, at any rate, has been its effect.  Legal ingenuity, however, can get round anything.  The Supreme Court decided as long ago as 1789 that an income tax was not a direct tax, and need not, therefore, be apportioned among the States.  During the Civil War, though not, curiously enough, until every other source of taxable wealth had pretty well run dry, an income tax was actually imposed by three separate Acts of Congress, the Act of 1864 levying a tax of 5 per cent. on all incomes between $600 and $5,000, and of 10 per cent. on all incomes above $5,000.  The tax continued to be collected up to 1872, when it was repealed.