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  The Federal inheritance tax imposed at the time of the Spanish war was soon repealed, and this domain of taxation, with the income tax, is now almost universally employed by the States.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 principle itself can hardly be carried much farther, but it will be necessary to have some understanding or arrangement between the States, whereby double or treble succession taxes are not imposed on the same estate, as notably in the case of the stock or bonds of railroads chartered in several States, all of which may undertake to impose full succession taxes upon such stock.  It has been held that succession taxes may be graded even in cases where a State constitution provides for proportionate taxation, the tax being an excise tax and not a direct property tax; but this is not so in respect to income taxes.  We may assume therefore that income taxes must be equal in States which have this constitutional provision, although in one or two of them recent statutes have exempted a portion of the income of veterans of the Civil War.  This might be sustained as a pension, pensions being for actual military service constitutional, and are in the Southern States expressly permitted to Confederate soldiers and their families—­despite the implied prohibition of the Fourteenth Amendment.