[Sidenote:  Taxes on personal property.] Personal property includes pretty much everything that one can own except lands and buildings,—­pretty much everything that can be moved or carried about from one place to another.  It thus includes ready money, stocks and bonds, ships and wagons, furniture, pictures, and books.  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 blank spaces which he is to fill with written answers.  The questions relate to every kind of property, and when the person addressed returns the list to the assessors he must make oath