It may properly be said of such legislation 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 perfect 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.